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Il saggio descrive l'intervento di Pasquale Culotta e Bibi Leone a Palma di Montechiaro nel Quartiere Calvario Pizzillo. Si tratta di un opera poco nota degli architetti siciliani. Il saggio quindi mira a colmare una lacuna nella documentazione. Ma il saggio ha lo scopo principale di analizzare questa opera per le sue peculiarità. Per fare ciò affronta alcuni temi generali che vengono puntualmente messi in opera nel complesso intervento di Culotta e Leone: il progetto urbano, il valore civile dell'intervento architettonico, il "nuovo realismo" progettuale, i rapporti con l'edilizia illegale, le possibilità di un'architettura "low budget". La realtà di Palma di Montechiaro è infatti tragicamente segnata dall'essere uno dei centri del Mezzogiorno dove l'edilizia abusiva è più presente. Il saggio delinea lo scenario politico-sociale di Palma di Montechiaro a partire dal Dopoguerra; illustra i caratteri dell'insediamento; descrive l'intervento composto da 5 edifici, ne analizza la strategia nelle sue articolazioni. The urban project of Pasquale Culotta and Bibi Leone in Palma di Montechiaro in the area Calvario Pizzillo dates 2005-8. It is a rather misknown, yet remarkable, work by the 2 Sicilian architects. It a somewhat extended urban project, encopassing as many as 5 buildings and several external public spaces, including a parking area, a garden and a stairway system. Michele Sbacchi's essay not only fills an historiographic gap. It also clarifies the implications and the general attitude of the design. Palma di Montechiaro, and more particularly the area of construction, is a mostly illegal centre. Culotta and Leone propose an innovative realistic attitude that manages by means of a very low budget to make use existing conditions.

The essay relates research and teaching activities about the interethnic city carried out by Pasquale Culotta between the end of the 90’s and the beginning of 2000’s at the Faculty of Architecture in Palermo. This is the starting point of a study about the new condition of the migration in Italy and especially in Sicily where the phenomenon had a rearing in 2013. The new state of the migration pushed the research towards two directions: 1 - a long-term response related with a constant urbanization; 2 - another caused by an urgent nature that often characterizes landings. On these two topics the university education can be implemented. Two recent exhibitions can be useful to lead this goal: “Odyssey” by Ai Weiwei in Palermo and “No Name” in Favara (Agrigento). Teaching and research works about so urgent themes can play a very important role in order to orient urban policies sensitizing civil society on issues that often people prefer to ignore.

Thanks to some autobiographical memories, Andrea Sciascia thinks back to the places and themes explored in the laboratories of architectural and urban design by Giuseppe Di Benedetto, Adriana Sarro and Gianfranco Tuzzolino. The short holiday periods spent when he was a child in Lampedusa and the teaching methology and the research about multiethnic town, carried out with Pasquale Culotta, constitute a system of reference thanks to which Sciascia manages to frame the work of the three teachers of Palermo according to traditional studies at the Faculty of Architecture of Palermo. The essay establishes a network of relationships between some of the latest results of the teaching of architectural design in Palermo and cultural antecedents, which evidently inspired them. The text shows, in parallel, such as the contemporary tragic event of immigration is a responsibility of the civil architecture which, at the beginning of the XXI century, has to answer to important and urgent questions. Responses are able to underline the wealth of ethnic groups and their cultures that arrive on the shres of Italy at the mercy of the sea and the waves.