massacre of Portella della Ginestra
The Portella della Ginestra massacre took place on 1 May 1947 in the area of the same name which is central between the municipalities of Piana degli Albanesi and San Giuseppe Jato, in the province of Palermo. In the hours immediately following the massacre, the investigators identified the bandit Salvatore Giuliano as the vile hand who, together with his gang and at the request of the local mafia, shot at the crowd that had gathered in Portella della Ginestra, barbarically killing eleven people. From that tragic date, the Portella della Ginestra massacre went from being an infamous criminal act to becoming one of Italy's unsolved mysteries as over the years revelations and findings were added with disturbing details on the involvement of members of political and military institutions, so much so as to indicate the Portella della Ginestra as the first State Massacre.
It was in 1977 on the occasion of a session in the Sicilian Regional Assembly that for the first time, after thirty long years, the Portella della Ginestra massacre was remembered in a united way by Sicilian political and social forces. For the first time the victims of Portella were not just one party, the CGIL and the left-wing parties, but everyone and as the organ of the communist party L'Unità wrote «the deaths, the tragedies of the workers' movement became the deaths and the tragedies of the entire nation." Those who sealed that historic turning point were the communist Pancrazio De Pasquale, president of the Regional Assembly, the Christian Democrat Angelo Bonfiglio, President of the Region and Luciano Lama, general secretary of the CGIL.
For a more detailed historical analysis on the Portella della Ginestra massacre, visitpiana.com suggests you refer to the bibliography of the historian Francesco Petrotta who is considered one of the leading experts on the topic.
Latest News
The President of the Italian Republic Sergio Mattarella and the President of the Republic of Albania Bajram Begaj visited the Portella della Ginestra Memorial.
On Friday 18 October 2024, on the occasion of the institutional visit to Piana degli Albanesi, the President of the Italian Republic with his Albanian counterpart visited the Portella della Ginestra Memorial and laid a wreath. President Mattarella spoke with the survivor Serafino Petta and greeted the members of the Association of family members and survivors of the Portella della Ginestra massacre. If you would like to find out more about this visit you can click here
The Portella della Ginestra memorial
The Memorial of Portella della Ginestra (Përmendorja and Mesi së Jinestrës) is an original natural-monumental arrangement of the place, located in the homonymous district of Piana degli Albanesi . The monumental arrangement of Portella della Ginestra is a work of land art (art of the land, of the territory) of which there are various other examples in the world. The Memorial was designed and built between 1979 - 1980 by Ettore de Conciliis , painter and sculptor, with the collaboration of the painter Rocco Falciano and the architect Giorgio Stockel.
The work, which is neither ephemeral nor ideological, was immersed in nature and landscape to avoid closing the memory of the massacre in an architectural block or in a closed group of figures. Going beyond the monumental arrangements conceived in a more traditional way, the artist attempted to impress a gigantic and perennial sign of memory on the stony plateau of Portella della Ginestra. A dry wall flanked by a typical trazzera, for a length of about 40 meters, cuts the earth, like a wound, in the direction of the shots. All around, for an area of about one square kilometer, where there were the fallen of 1 May 1947 , there are large local stone boulders, 2 to 6 meters high, quarried on the site of the stony ground. One of them is the Nicola Barbato boulder, from where the prestigious manager Arbëreshë of the Sicilian Fasci dei Lavoratori used to speak to his people. Others briefly figure bodies, faces and shapes of fallen animals. In two others the names of the fallen and a poem are respectively engraved. Having been a massacre that struck an ethno-linguistic minority, a new work by Ettore de Conciliis includes another large boulder, also in local stone, engraved with a poem in Albanian . (Wikipedia text)
The massacre told by the witnesses
The massacre told by the historian Francesco Renda
The massacre told in the printed media
