Città fantasma? Lo scarto paesaggistico di Poggioreale

This contribution, divided into three paragraphs, intends to advance a critical reflec- tion on the so-called ghost towns, neglected urban spaces following the impact of a crisis, a war, a calamity or a devastation. Often squeezed between the recovery plans and the rhetoric of the relaunch, they constitute signs engraved in the landscape in which, on closer inspection, the transformative dynamics, absent man, immediately began their own land- scape transfiguration. The contribution does not make proposals but raises questions. To do this, a first part (par. 1, 2, 3) in which the phenomenon of ghost towns is framed in the various geographical perspectives is followed by a second section (par. 4, 5), deliberately more narrative, which reduces the observation scale and critically questions the ruins of Poggioreale, in the Belìce Valley. Many decades after the earthquake that triggered the daily reconstruction process, with a community of reference increasingly restricted due to time and depopulation, we linger on the texture between landscape, memory and identity, and on its glimpses that, perhaps, should be let it transpire and transfigure. Brief conclusions conclude the paper (par. 6).