Neighbourhoods
San Berillo, the painted quarter
Gutted in the Fifties, abandoned for half a century, today it is where Catania looks at itself. Visit on foot, in daylight, with respect.
3 min read
All issuesFive minutes from the Teatro Massimo begins a piece of the city that guidebooks skipped for fifty years. San Berillo is the quarter Catania half demolished and then stopped looking at.
People go there now. Not the way you go to a monument: the way you go to a neighbourhood where people live.
What happened
In the Fifties the redevelopment plan decided the old San Berillo had to come down. Thousands of homes were demolished and tens of thousands of people moved, to make room for a new boulevard — today's viale XX Settembre — and for a modern quarter that was only partly built.
What was left standing, between the new blocks and the centre, was a piece of city with no name and no plan: narrow streets, emptied houses, and for decades prostitution as the only visible economy. For Catanesi it was, for a long time, the place nobody talked about.
This is not a "regenerated" quarter. It is an inhabited one, rewriting itself while you walk through it.
Why people go now
Because over the last fifteen years people came back. Associations, artists, cooperatives, small workshops: someone bought a house cheaply, someone else opened a space, and the quarter began to paint itself.
The walls are the first thing you see. These are not murals commissioned as part of a regeneration scheme: they are separate interventions, made at different times, some by well-known names and some not, layered onto facades that are still gutted. A roofless house with one wall painted blue tells the whole story of the place in a single image.
How to visit
On foot, in daylight, with the attention you would give any neighbourhood in a real city. The area is small: the streets around via delle Finanze and the small internal squares. In an hour you have seen it all; in three you have stopped to talk to someone.
Two things worth keeping in mind, and they are not generic warnings:
- Ask before photographing people. Here more than anywhere: some of them live here and did not choose to become a subject.
- The quarter changes in the evening. It is not a forbidden zone, but nor is it a tourist stroll after dark. The little squares with tables outside are a different matter and stay lively.
What to look for
The small square with the tables, where people eat outside in summer and sit in the sun in winter. The association spaces, whose doors are often open and whose people are glad to explain. And the dead-end streets, the ones that stop against the wall of a Sixties block: that is the exact point where the scar of the demolition is visible.
San Berillo cannot be understood in ten minutes and does not sit well in a single photograph. But it is the part of Catania that best explains all the rest: how the city can be so beautiful and so wounded on the same block.