Refugees breathe new life into empty Sicilian town
The entrance hall of the hulking Senatore G. Mormino school in the Sicilian hill town of Sutera is dominated by an unusual wall decoration. It is an enormous photo – more than two metres long – of a rickety boat taking African asylum seekers to Lampedusa, the rocky Mediterranean island halfway between Sicily and Tunisia.
Sutera is an ancient town plastered onto the side of an enormous monolithic rock, topped with a convent, in the middle of the western half of Sicily, about 90 minutes by car south of the Sicilian capital Palermo. Like many old Sicilian towns, it is a chaotic mix of arabesque, medieval and Renaissance architecture that makes it fairly popular with European tourists in the summer. But its distinguishing feature is an eerie emptiness. Since the 1960s, the population has steadily dropped from about 5,000 to 1,000 as deaths outnumbered births and the young fled to big Italian and northern European cities to find work. The funeral shop is one business that thrives.
▻http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/refugees-breathe-new-life-into-empty-sicilian-town/article28661641
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