From 7/9/22 to 6/30/2024
Phil Stern Pavilion
Museo Storico Sbarco in Sicilia
Catania
1943. Luoghi e volti della Sicilia liberata
Photo by Nick Parrino. Curated by Ezio Costanzo
In collaboration with the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., the OELLE Mediterraneo Antico Foundation presented the photography exhibition "1943. Faces and Places of Liberated Sicily," curated by historian Ezio Costanzo, at its Phil Stern Pavilion at Le Ciminiere in Catania. The exhibition, in partnership with the Metropolitan City of Catania-Museo Storico Sbarco in Sicilia 1943, featured 80 images by Nick Parrino, an Italian-American photographer who served with the U.S. Army during World War II. In September 1943, he captured moments of daily life in Sicily following the armistice of September 3.
Little is known about the photographer Nick Parrino. His surname reveals his Italian origins, but his date and place of birth are still unknown. He seems to have lived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he died in 1979. Before the war he worked as a photographer for the Cleveland Plain newspaper. For the OWI Parrino photographed on various war fronts, including North Africa, the Middle East and Italy. He worked as a photojournalist for Wide World Photos and, after the war, was a photo editor for Newsweek magazine. He was also the director of the photography library of the Cities Service Co. (later CITGO) where he worked until 1967.
In the photos of Parrino, enlisted in the OWI, the Office of War Information, the government agency for information and propaganda campaigns, there is the liberated Sicily of the days following Operation Husky and the smiling faces of the population that resumes life by rebuilding its existence. The shots reveal the intent of the OWI photographer to portray, sometimes in an idyllic way, the recovery of social and economic life both in the big cities, such as Palermo, Catania, Agrigento, Messina, Syracuse, and in the small provincial towns and in the countryside. People are careful to put the pieces of their existence back together and, in this rural and popular Sicily, everyone lends a hand to everyone, supported by the US soldiers themselves.
And here are the farmers on Etna, the fishermen, the workers who work the stone to rebuild the roads, the moments of relaxation and cultural entertainment organized by Amgot, the master craftsmen, the places of history and art that have always enchanted the world. Nick Parrino's images do not show the battles, but the serene state of mind of many Sicilians who, once again in the course of their centuries-old history, have been able to overcome with a spirit of sacrifice the defeat of a war, experienced as always as a fatal calamity.
«In the exhibition - says Ezio Costanzo, curator of the exhibition - only a part of the photos taken by Parrino in Sicily during the war, preserved in the Library of Congress in Washington, are exhibited. They are images in which the moment freezes history, giving us back the great value of documentary photography, which becomes testimony to the social and economic culture of a place and its people».
