Baroque Disruptions in Val Di Noto, Sicily*

This article is a story about the creation and protection of baroque architecture in Val di Noto, Sicily, since the late seventeenth century (Figure 1). It is about the 1693 earthquake that destroyed sixty towns in the region and about the citizens who rebuilt the towns with a rate of speed and a degree of innovation that still astonish observers. The recovery yielded an architectural style that is recognized today as the "Sicilian baroque" (Blunt 1968; Dufour and Raymond 1994; Trigilia 2007) (Figures 2 and 3). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] This article is also about the revalorization of the style following the 1990 earthquake. Only after this quake collapsed part of the Noto cathedral (see Figure 3), the grandest of Sicilian baroque churches, did activists begin a twelve-year-long movement to gain recognition and protection by UNESCO World Heritage, which they achieved in 2002 (WHC: 2009). When an American oil company, Panther Eureka, began exploratory drilling close to some of the protected sites in 2006, the newly sensitized residents mounted a drive that greatly exceeded the social complexity and spatial extension of the earlier movement to include not only protection of the Sicilian baroque landscapes but also a complex of diverse economic, political, social, and environmental objectives (Scarafia 2007). Local and outside observers alike viewed earthquakes and foreign exploiters as similar threats to their social and material way of life, and contemporary and historical accounts made direct comparisons between the two forms of agency (Account 1693; Boscarino 1981; Finley, Mark Smith, and Duggan 1986; Fras 2007; Valentini 2007b). Theoretically, this article builds on the work of Michel Serres, a member of the French Academy and arguably the grand-pere of actor-network theory and science, technology, and society, two post-structuralist schools of thought that inform contemporary geographical study. I write "arguably" because Serres, though acknowledging his influence on these intellectual movements, by temperament and on principle has eschewed enrollment in them (Serres and Latour 1995). I use Serres's concept of the "parasite" as a form of agency that catalyzes the transformation of social-material geographies by disrupting them ([1980] 2007). Parasites, to which I will refer to as "disruptions" throughout this piece, may be destructive in and of themselves, but they are also essential to the efficient functioning of the larger system (Gabrys 2009). My study also contributes a unique cultural and historical perspective to conversations on relationships between natural phenomena and built landscapes in transhistorical and postcatastrophic contexts (Delia Dora 2005; Wilford 2008). To the discussions of disaster capitalism it offers accounts of how actors interacted with material culture to resist outside incursions into postdisaster places that support and expand current understandings (Clare 2007; Klein 2007; Stiglitz 2007). Finally, it broadens and enriches the concepts of authenticity and integrity as used by UNESCO World Heritage and more generally (Alberts and Hazen 2010). PARASITES AS DISRUPTIONS For Serres, the important measure of anything is the aggregate. He revels in the potential of chaos and the possibility in disorder (Brown 2002). In the introductory essay to Serres's The Parasite ([1980] 2007), Gary Wolfe cites Gregory Bateson in discussing the Kantian notion of creation that derives not from selecting certain facts from a known set of facts but from "an infinite number of facts" (Bateson 2000, cited in Wolfe 2007, xxiv). It is in this undetermined and multivariate sea that Serres swims most happily. Only within a general ocean of chaos do our systems take form and have meaning. Wolfe likens surrender to the unknowable to an openhanded style of prayer in which the gesture conforms to a lofty and expansive entity, perhaps the sun or the unbounded sky. …