Antonio Presti

Here's a story worth telling. Some chap I met in the 90s, Antonio Presti, about our age, is the son of one of the Sicilian "four cavaliers of the apocalypse", i.e. the four powerful families, not exactly Mafia bosses, but the kings of cement and the construction industry which has, for decades, been in the hands of the Mafia, inasmuch as, if you didn't buy your cement, builders and equipment from one of these four, the work just didn't get done or, if you did try, your excavators would get blown up as a warning. The gentle Antonio Presti, a classic puffy-faced gay, as soon as his father died, sold the whole cement works and everything and, with the enormous proceeds, has since dedicated himself to financing works of art, starting out with buying a kilometer of canvas, plus paint, and inviting anyone to make paintings on it. His most extravagant is the Porta della Bellezza, the Door of Beauty, taking the brutal cement sides of a motorway overpass in Librino, the most degraded periphery of Catania, and covering them with pottery sculptures and poetry. And he's just completed another one, in the same style, on the sides of another stretch of the same motorway bypass. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4829641,15.0530834,3a,75y,359.19h,91.41t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s_UOZq_CJuSWuXoONi3HkKA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 Librino is where they dumped all the inhabitants of the zone where I currently live when, in the 1950s, they decided to demolish this central quartiere full of small industry and workshops, and build a superstrada of high-rise banks and insurance offices from the town center (Pzza. Stesicoro) and the central station, apparently so that tanks would be able to reach the city centre without impediment (!). If you go to Librino, there are 14-year-olds with binoculars and two-way radios, working as an alarm system for the weed and coke sellers in the basement of the highrise that here they call "Il Palazzo di Cemento". The contrast between the nature of the zone and this investment in urban art is shocking. I can only assume that he thought of it as the place where something like this would have most impact. An interesting detail: in the ten or twenty years since he opened the first tract of it, despite the neighbourhood, it has *never* been defaced. Not even a squirt of someone's pen-name. I'm still boggling at the vision, and the temerity, of such a person. To be able to realise things like this, do you maybe have to be the rich son of a Mafia boss?