Atopia in Celleno Ghost Town. Phenomenology in three acts

Borgo Celleno, usually defined as 'ghost village', lies in the heart of the Tiber valley, in the Tuscia Viterbese region and is the result of a process of depopulation due to numerous landslides and earthquakes. The climax of this abandonment occurred in 1951 when the President of the Republic defined “the village of Celleno cancelled”. From that moment, the old village became a waiting heritage, a place deliberately removed on paper, but in reality still tangible, partially intact, half the subject of a redevelopment project and half a ruin. It looks like an archaeological remnant, timeless and asemic, where wild nature attempts to fill the void that the exodus of its inhabitants has caused. The landscape-atopia of Celleno is described through a phenomenology divided into three acts. This is an atopia in three meanings that correspond to three spatial moments-situations. Through the first gaze, linked to aesthetics, we make ingression into another dimension; through the second we unfold its historical memory; finally, through the third we experience the wild nature that inhabits a landscape in ruins, halfway between what it was and what is being transformed, according to the metamorphosis of all things. Ours is a story that is the fruit of a journey through Celleno, a journey on foot because “walking today becomes an ethical imperative and an exercise of cultural protection for those who remain, for those who await not only those who return, but also those who arrive, the new travellers, the new guests”.