In 1968, the town of Gibellina in Sicily, Italy, was destroyed by an earthquake. Its residents decided to rebuild the town in a nearby (and hopefully more stable) location, thus turning the original site into a ghost town.
That's where art stepped in. Juergen of the travel blog for91days wrote
Between 1985 and 1989, a Sicilian artist named Alberto Burri used the old city’s ruins as the canvas for his most audacious work of modern sculpture. The resulting concrete cemetery is a bold piece of art, a comment on death, and a moving tribute to the devastated city.
Burri covered the streets of Old Gibellina with concrete, preserving the layout of the blocks. Walking around his monument is unsettling. You’re not just standing on the gravestone of a city, but actually tracing the lines of its corpse. Block after block of grey concrete rises from the concrete ground, like the ghosts of buildings. They’re high enough to peer over, so that the rest of the graves are always visible, along with the verdant valley stretching out into the distance.
See more pics: Link - Thanks Juergen!
Ste, we don't have to visit it to understand the concept. I think forest or farmland would not only be a better use of space, but a living field would be a far better memorial/tribute to the living town it replaced.
walking through this footmark of a town is emotionally breathtaking. It's one of the most sober and noble example for a mourning homage.