The scandalous story of a nursery

Built in 1977, abandoned, devastated, squatted in, turned into a haven for drug dealers, rebuilt, and still uninhabited today in 2026. If you are seeking a tangible example of administrative futility, anti-Mafia rhetoric and political hot air, you will find it effortlessly in Palermo. A monumental public project born of idle chatter, whether from those in uniform or not. One might think: it’s a theatre, a stadium, a bridge. No, it’s a small nursery for thirty children.

We are in the working-class neighbourhood of Sperone, on the south-eastern outskirts of the city. An area rife with the Mafia, drug dealing and illegal building, but also one characterised by a spirit of civic resilience. And it was of little help that Don Pino Puglisi, the priest murdered by the Mafia on 15 September 1993 on his 56th birthday – a man who had seen the bigger picture in the social strategy to combat the excessive power of the Mafia bosses – had also been clamouring for this nursery. The story of this facility, located on Via XXVII Maggio (the date on which, in 1860, Garibaldi and his men entered Palermo), serves as a case study for understanding not only how a twisted history is built upon the rotten foundations of failure, but also how the resilience of political power is gauged in the face of certain defeat: dissatisfied and unreimbursed, yet somehow maintaining a semblance of institutional consistency. ‘It’s just a nursery,’ one might say. But precisely because it is just a nursery, the events surrounding it are all the more grotesque.

Twenty-five local councils, four interior design schemes, one fire, two demolitions (one due to vandalism, the other, so to speak, unavoidable), one reconstruction: the nursery was handed over to the local council for the first time forty-nine years ago, in that fateful year of 1977. Amidst the lack of accountability in those times – not unlike those that were to follow (but that’s a spoiler) – the signatures needed to carry out a simple task were missing: to open the gates and welcome those blessed thirty children.

Lo Sperone is not Disneyland, and Palermo is one of the world capitals of the ‘mitosis of neglect’, where – taking the biological process of cell division as a model – once a problem arises, it multiplies to infinite proportions. Example: someone throws rubbish onto the street, and immediately a proliferation begins, whereby what starts as a single bin bag quickly turns into a stratospheric pile of rubbish.

Right from the start, therefore, the nursery remains closed and, above all, unattended. It becomes a playground for dangerous games involving real guns, which are more common in those parts than rucksacks and school bags. Then a group of Roma arrives and decides to settle there illegally. As the years go by, the users change. Drug dealers turn it into a drop-in centre for their customers, with a perverse focus on ‘customer care’: there, you buy drugs, consume them, deal with the after-effects and, if necessary, die. In 2014, a fire devastates the building. What remains becomes something else, something worse. In the neighbourhood, they no longer call it a nursery – even though it never was one – but the ‘house of horrors’. Those blackened walls and the remnants of a humanity teetering amidst syringes, bullet casings and condoms have become the perfect negative symbol. A symbol too cumbersome for those who believe in the neighbourhood’s rebirth. Antonella Di Bartolo, headteacher of the Sperone-Pertini school in Palermo and the driving force behind the campaign to reopen the building, explains: “Every day, on their way to school, rather than passing by the shop windows of a shop or a supermarket, an office, a chemist’s or any ordinary street scene in a normal city, the children of Sperone saw the house of horrors”.

Di Bartolo, who recounted her experience in the book "Domani c’è scuola", is a professional who tackles early school leaving – that is, every teacher’s worst nightmare – with a no-nonsense approach: she goes and fetches the children directly from their homes, knocks on the door, explains to the parents that there simply must be a place for school in their children’s future, and physically brings them to class, hand in hand. That is how, in ten years, she has slashed the dropout rate from 27 per cent to one per cent – through sheer hard work and no idle chatter.

But let’s get back to the story about the nursery.

From the rubble of the 2014 fire emerge four blackened pillars and a realisation: what remains of the school must be demolished; reconstruction must start from scratch. Di Bartolo begins his pilgrimage through the town hall offices. But politicians come and go, and the commitment made by one turns into the refusal of another; the shoulders on which to lean become those that are then shrugged in surrender or to hide from a responsibility that no one wants to take on. One day, in Via XXVII Maggio, a tree is planted to symbolise the neighbourhood’s desire for rebirth, right on the ashes of a promise. Local councillors and senior military officials attend the event. In the wasteland surrounding that tree, a celebration is organised worthy of the grand occasions of the PPP – the ‘Palermo Promise Factory’ – complete with a flag-raising ceremony, the national anthem, and a blessing from Maria Falcone. Di Bartolo recalls: “Once the event was over, there was a game of passing the buck regarding tasks and responsibilities, and everything remained as it was. Just like the stall selling contraband cigarettes next to the school, which on the morning the tree was planted had brazenly maintained its position despite the deployment of law enforcement officers.”

For another five years, nothing happens. The demolition remains a promise. The house of horrors stands there, its scars on full display, amplifying its horrific impact. We will have to wait until 2019 for the bulldozers to arrive. On 19 February of that year, the Sperone-Pertini school organises a party right in front of the crumbling monstrosity. They improvise a civics lesson right there on the street. There are schoolchildren, teachers and parents: three thousand people gathered to watch a cloud of dust rise into the sky. When the bulldozers sink their teeth into the last of the rubble, applause breaks out. Just like a goal, but the match isn’t over yet.

What should I do now?

The Palermo Institute of Architects has stepped forward to provide a reconstruction plan. The neighbourhood is being involved to gauge how people would like the new nursery to be. It is all the work of the headteacher, teachers and parents, who have put together a sort of survey by asking people on the street, amongst the stalls at the Monday market. At the heart of it all is the Sperone-Pertini school, partly for social reasons, or rather for urban planning reasons. In that corner of Palermo, there is no real square; there are only crossroads. All the neighbourhood meetings, as well as the meetings with municipal engineers and architects, take place in the school. To be precise, in the building’s large amphitheatre, which has a beautiful name: Piazza delle Parole.

The result is an idea that brings together engineering requirements and children’s drawings, the views of mothers and care for the elderly, the sports ground and the playground. From a single desk to the very last swing, the remarkable group of pupils studying inside a school to design another school put together a project which is handed over to the mayor (one of the twenty-five), who promises: “Work will begin next week”. It is 2019, and nothing will happen either “next week” or in the weeks that follow. It will take another five years for the reconstruction to begin.

But on the path of hope for the nursery in Via XXVII Maggio, there is a long way to go and little hope. In 2024, the building site finally opens, but only briefly. A month and a half later, the workers and machinery disappear. “As it was December, we thought it was the Christmas break,” says Di Bartolo. “But when nobody returned in January, we began to worry.” In the meantime, the nursery – or rather, its building site – became a venue for art installations. That year, the ‘Rosalie Ribelli’ social group placed 17 dolls in front of the excavations for the new building: 17 is not a random number; it represents the number of months of work expected before completion. But the workers were nowhere to be seen. It transpired that they had fled almost immediately following a series of armed intimidations, thefts of vehicles and demands for protection money. They only returned to work after the prefect and the mayor arranged for their protection.

And so we come to the present day. A few weeks ago, the nursery was handed over to the local council. ‘The story’s over,’ you might say. Not at all.

The second constituency, which also includes the Sperone neighbourhood, has around 75,000 inhabitants, including 3,000 children of nursery age. Yet the mothers in the area were ready to celebrate those thirty places as if they were three hundred, but, as punctual as every disappointment in this saga, a halt was called: no enrolments for 2026; the matter will be discussed in 2027. According to the council’s technical staff, the necessary certificates of suitability, staff and online enrolments are all missing. And then there is the usual safety issue, exacerbated precisely by the postponement of the opening, which rewinds the tape and takes us back to square one. How did this odyssey begin? With a building that was ready but not open, which fell prey to vandals and drug dealers. Now history risks repeating itself, 49 years on. Surveillance by the municipal police is not enough, so a private security firm, Sicurtransport, has stepped in to provide the service free of charge.

To summarise. In Palermo, a nursery school that took almost fifty years to open must be guarded as if it were a courthouse, and the local council – that is, the state – is forced to rely on volunteers from the private sector to ensure its security.

Vito Riggio, former president of ENAC and an expert on matters concerning Palermo, reflects: “It is a small public works project, but also an essential community service needed to lend credibility to the many populist rants about regenerating the suburbs and protecting minors – rants spouted by petty charlatans, empty rhetoricians who manipulate words. Empty words, given the pitiful state of even the less outlying areas of a city that was once rich in culture and beauty.”

When discussing Palermo’s suspended, postponed, forgotten or botched projects, one inevitably ends up mentioning the mother of all unfinished projects: the Ring Road. It is a major road, 12 kilometres long, linking the Palermo–Catania motorway with the Palermo–Mazara del Vallo motorway. Planned in the 1950s and redesigned every twenty years, it still remains unfinished to this day. Antony Passalacqua, one of the founders of Mobilita Palermo – an association that has been working on local issues and quality of life for 16 years – recalls: “The ring road remains unfinished to this day. Still missing are the Perpignano underpass, the underpass at the Oreto junction, and various pedestrian overpasses to allow people to cross the carriageways safely. Too much money has been spent on the pedestrian underpasses, which are real money-pits due to the constant renovation work required because of persistent damp. Some of them are still closed and serve only as illegal rubbish dumps and shelters for drug addicts. There is also a lack of variable-message signs that could alert motorists in good time in the event of accidents. Meanwhile, all that remains of some footbridges are the renderings.”

Such is Palermo. Projects and words, ostentatious remembrance and guaranteed oblivion, boundless rhetoric and narrow-minded politics. The example of the Sperone is crucial. It was not the state that came up with the idea of brightening up the anonymous grey blocks of flats with murals by great contemporary artists. Nor was it the state that decided to multiply the uniqueness of the patron saint, Rosalia, into hundreds of ‘Rosalie Ribelli’ who celebrate by uniting the neighbourhood under a triumphal float of the Santuzza – a float that was first abandoned and then, thanks to their efforts, restored. It is not the state that views children as a solution rather than a problem, investing in child protection as if taking out an insurance policy: a nursery is infinitely more valuable than a thousand conferences. It is the teachers, the children and their parents, the neighbourhood’s residents. They are the ones who stay and who have watched, for fifty years, a parade of self-proclaimed experts offering empty promises, yet unable even to ensure the running of a school that provides a roof over the children’s heads and a refuge for their parents.

Amidst the wear and tear of politics, arguments about regenerating the suburbs are watered down, serving only to make the discourse seem lofty. Today in Sicily, the most fertile ground for the anti-Mafia movement lies in middle-class drawing rooms and on the terraces of luxurious flats in the historic centre. From there, one observes with detachment the miseries of the criminal sludge below and scans the horizon of the suburbs, where the most convenient form of evil takes root: that in which the narrative is one thing, and what is actually happening is quite another.

This is happening in Palermo, where for almost fifty years a nursery – built, abandoned, devastated, squatted in, converted into a hideout for drug dealers, rebuilt, left uninhabited and still closed – has been unable to accommodate its thirty young pupils. A nursery that the Mafia does not like and in which the anti-Mafia movement has no interest. A nursery that does not even have a name.