“Cortile Napoli” is a tribute to the lives of children, facing a very difficult context in a district of Palermo named Zisa-Danisinni, inhabited by a high number of vulnerable families, mainly foreigners and unemployed.

I focused on this particular district because it caught my attention since the very first time I accidentally passed by. The district has a peculiar urban aspect: even if Zisa and Danisinni are part of the same geographical area, they are often thought as two different living units. The rione Danisinni, surrounded by caves, ups and downs, is located in a area of depression in the riverbed of Papireto, lower than the rest of the city: you can glimpse Danisinni from the higher streets of Zisa and it seems a place impossible to reach. Only the people who know the district very well can show you the way through a small corridor carved into the rock, in an alley that seems to bring nowhere.

A few months after discovering this area I met Paola, mother of Alma, Clara and Angela. She showed me where she lives with her family, in a very small alley of Zisa called Cortile Napoli. Despite being a very tiny space to live in, it immediately felt like home to me. The apartment is partly open, with a small patio surrounded by old, decadent buildings, and big white tarps that delimit the kitchen and a small room with a sofa. The patio is animated by the sound of birds that Salvo, Paola’s husband, used to breed. The boundaries between the outside and the inside of the building are labile: there is a strong synergy with the outside environment because the doorstep is adjacent to the streets. The lights, the noise of the district harmoniously mingle with the indoor sounds. Adjacent to the patio lives Aya, a little girl of Moroccan origins: from her window she watches Clara, Angela and Alma playing in the patio and she often joins them pretending to be their sister. Aya’s cousins, who live nearby, usually come to Cortile Napoli and the kids play together building their own world made of laughters, dreams and imagination, mixing their different cultures and habits with the authentic spirit of children. I stayed in Cortile Napoli as much as I could, driven by its spirit, trying to grasp the grace of the children’s plays and thoughts, being part of them, sweeping away any boundary.


-Virginia Zoli

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