La Chiamata

Since 1988 the town has carried this double identity: itself, and the place where a film about memory, exile, and return was born.

The mural is part of a series of works recalling scenes from the film — a set of images that have themselves become a kind of second life for the story, painted onto the walls of the place where it was made.

"La Chiamata" is a large-scale exterior mural painted in May 2024 on a building facade in Palazzo Adriano, a small town in the Palermo province of Sicily. Palazzo Adriano is known the world over as the filming location of Giuseppe Tornatore's "Nuovo Cinema Paradiso" (1988) — the Academy Award-winning film whose piazza, churches, and streets became the fictional village of Giancaldo. The subject of "La Chiamata" is Maria, the mother of Salvatore — called Totò — at the moment described in the film's final act: after she has broken the news of Alfredo's death, she waits for the return of her son, who left Giancarlo thirty years earlier at Alfredo's own instruction, and who has not come back since. She sits at a table covered by a white lace cloth. In the foreground of the composition: a glass bowl filled with lemons — Sicilian lemons, brilliant and luminous yellow, the bowl rendered in full hyperrealist detail with the transparency of the glass, the refraction of light through it, the weight of the fruit inside. One hand rests near the bowl; the other is raised to her cheek in the gesture of someone who waits, who has been waiting, who has made waiting the daily form of love. Her eyes are the centre of the image. They carry, as the official description of the work states, an attesa dolorosa e infinita — a painful and endless waiting — but also an active attention: she is not collapsed in grief but present in it, awake, still turned toward the return. The lemons are not decorative: they are the smell and colour of a place, of a land that does not leave you. They represent what the son left behind and what the mother has kept — the table, the lace, the fruit of the south, the specific weight of a Sicilian home. The title, "La Chiamata" — The Call — names the direction of the image: not the departure, but the drawing back. The call that homeland makes to those who have left; the call that a mother's waiting makes across distance and time. The work was painted from a cherry picker over approximately four days. Photographed in progress May 27–28; detail of the lemons May 29; finished wide shot May 30, 2024. From the official project text: "I limoni brillanti in primo piano ricordano la sua terra natale, i suoi occhi intensissimi raccontano l'attesa dolorosa e infinita. La scena è al tempo stesso simbolo della casa che attende e del senso di appartenenza, la figura di una madre che guarda il ritorno dei figli rappresenta il legame indissolubile e universale che ognuno di noi ha con la propria patria."