Ruins of Poggioreale Antica

Like a recent Pompeii, ancient Poggioreale is a theatre of ruins between drama and poetry, characterized by the suspension of time: a place of memory that tells the life of a community crystallized between the ’50s and ’60s along with its spaces and its architecture. 

Walking through the ghost town, you can see in what is left of the houses, tables and cupboards left there, desks and chairs in a school, shreds of frescoes in a church. 

In Corso Umberto I you can see the Town Hall, the school, the post office, the theatre, the main squares. The remains of the Mother Church and its bell tower, the Cannoli spring and the many abandoned houses are still visible.

In Palazzo Agosta, one of the few buildings made safe, the association “Poggioreale antica” has created a museum of memory, with photographs and objects collected in the abandoned houses. Among the photographs, those of the “before”, with the daily life depicting the church in the background, the priest with the black cassock and the children playing and the patronal buildings with flowers on the balconies, but also those of the after, which tell the devastation among the ruins, together with the relief and objects that have become symbols of salvation, such as stretchers.   

Poggioreale Antica is a place that causes pain, but it is a necessary pain, an act of love owed to remember the victims.