Up There
Nino used to be a bricklayer and once lived with his family in one of the enormous council houses of Brancaccio, on the outskirts of Palermo.
Then one day, while he was driving his car, the sky split open and he was borne aloft towards the light. When he returned to his body, he was no longer the same.
Now – after about twenty years of residence in the old abandoned military observatory – he has completed work and has finally decided to reveal himself to the world, opening his temple to one and all - a building full of shining naïf mosaics which one can hardly believe to be the work of this diminutive and introverted sixty year old, considered by most to be a harmless crackpot.
Is Nino alias Isravele, the author of the magnificent temple, a man deeply inspired by a superior vision... or simply a fool?
But, deep down, what is exactly – Art? Has it something to do with the divine? Is it a sort of mission, to which only few people suited can access through a ‘narrow door’?
And, in this secularized world - which place is left for the Artist?
Up there, on the very top of a barren mountain that towers above the city of Palermo, a strange building stands out against the sky: it’s an old military observatory which has now been transformed into a very unique temple, entirely decorated with naïve mosaics.
Nino, alias Isravele, a 60 year old bricklayer, has been living there alone for more than twenty years. He goes up and down every day with a backpack loaded with pebbles and concrete. He carries his load from beneath to the heights of the mountain, and thus purifies it. He transforms neglect into beauty, through a constant work that he calls prayer. Because, he says, anything that isn't done for personal interest is a prayer.
This is the story of a bricklayer from the suburbs that one day became a prophet, the story of a man who got out of the world to reveal, from up there, a different, vaster horizon, a new road for a stranded humanity, a path where man, divinity and nature return to be one.
Because, as he says, quoting Revelation: "the time has come to destroy those who destroy the earth".
