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For days, the 25,000 residents of the Sicilian town of Niscemi have been living on the edge of a 25-metre abyss. On 25 January, after torrential rain brought by Cyclone Harry, a devastating landslide ripped away an entire slope of the town, creating a 4km-long chasm. Roads collapsed, cars were swallowed, and whole sections of the urban fabric plunged into the valley below.
Dozens of houses hang precariously over the edge of the landslide, while vehicles and fragments of roadway continue to give way, hour by hour, under the strain of unstable ground.
Authorities have evacuated more than 1,600 people so far. Entire sections of the historic centre are at risk, including 17th-century churches that could slide downhill at any moment.
According to geologists and environmental experts, the landslide in Niscemi is the latest sign of how the climate emergency is reshaping the Mediterranean, where there has been indifference to decades of flawed building policies and an out-of-control model of urbanisation.
“It all happened in a matter of moments,” said Salvatrice Disca, 70. She had been living in one of the homes now within the red zone designated by authorities as being at risk of collapse. “The power went out, and a few minutes later the police knocked on our door. They told us to leave immediately, to abandon everything and take only the essentials – a few blankets and our medicines. For a week we were unable even to wash or change what we were wearing.”
Most of those evacuated are staying with relatives, while the oldest have been moved to care homes. Others have been temporarily housed in bed-and-breakfasts. Outside the red zone, firefighters have set up a tent where residents wait to be escorted by rescue officials to retrieve valuables, photographs and paintings they were unable to gather as they fled their homes.
Authorised by rescue teams, the Guardian joined a mission inside the red zone, accompanying firefighters. Among the buildings destined to be abandoned permanently is a well-known pizzeria, A Barunissa. Its owner, Benedetta Ragusa, 41, has only minutes to salvage machinery and furnishings.
The landslide is advancing. Last week, a three-storey residential building broke away from the edge of the precipice and smashed into the landslide’s steep slope below, after teetering on the brink for six days.
“We’re emptying the place,” Ragusa said. “It’s over. We’ve lost everything.”
A hush has settled over the town, the kind that arrives just before catastrophe: the streets have emptied, the urban landscape reduced to a ghost town in the aftermath of the landslide.
Perched on the edge of the mudflow, the Biblioteca Marsiano, a public library, hangs over the void. Its basement holds more than 4,000 rare and historically valuable books. Writers have urged authorities to recover the collection, including rare pre-1830 editions on Sicilian history, but the library lies in the “black zone”, off-limits even to firefighters – leaving the books’ fate, like that of hundreds of inhabitants, uncertain.
“People are traumatised,” said Davide Cascio, 38, a volunteer with Outside, which is providing support to evacuees. “For many, this was not just a house: within those walls was their entire life, their memories. There is a mix of anger and despair, because they know this disaster could have been prevented.”
The same stretch in the town had already collapsed in 1790, when a landslide forced people to flee the Sante Croci neighbourhood. More than two centuries later, in October 1997, the ground gave way again, triggering mass evacuations. Despite this history, many buildings in the area were erected decades later, from the 1950s and 60s onward, alongside 17th-century homes.
“My family lived in that house for three generations,” said Sofia Salvo, 61, a primary school teacher unable to return home since the landslide. “We renovated it for my retirement, after my grandfather and father built it legally. Now it’s gone, and I keep asking why the authorities allowed it in a risk area. Someone has to take responsibility.”
The public prosecutor’s office in Gela, a few kilometres from Niscemi, has opened an investigation into negligent disaster.
“We are examining a substantial body of material, including images provided by the Italian Space Agency,” Salvatore Vella, the chief prosecutor in Gela, said. “Witness hearings will follow. One thing is certain: no one will be spared scrutiny.”
What happened in Niscemi is far from an isolated case. According to geologists and environmental experts, it is the outcome of decades of reckless housing and planning policies, which, since the second world war, have largely ignored the country’s acute hydrogeological vulnerability.
Italy has built hundreds of new neighbourhoods and thousands of homes in fragile areas: along riverbeds, on unstable slopes, near cliffs, and in zones exposed to landslides, floods and seismic risk. In short, places where people should never have been encouraged to live.
According to a report by the national statistics agency Istat, released last November, for every 100 new homes built in Italy, 15 lack the necessary authorisations – in a country that, according to the Italian environmental association Legambiente, has recorded about 17,000 major landslides in more than 14,000 locations in just over a century, resulting in nearly 6,000 direct deaths.
In 1998, one of Italy’s deadliest landslides hit the city of Sarno in the southern Campania region. After days of heavy rain, entire hillsides collapsed, killing 160 people. Investigations later showed that many homes had been built illegally on unstable slopes.
“Over the past 70 years, a series of poor choices has compounded the damage,” said Christian Mulder, a professor of ecology and climate emergency at the University of Catania in Sicily. “Money from the European recovery programme, received after world war two, was badly spent in Italy, fuelling a reckless model of urbanisation that ignored environmental risk.”
Between 1948 and 1952, Italy received about $1.5bn in aid under the programme, known as the Marshall plan. Those funds fed rapid urbanisation in a country with weak planning and widespread clientelism, especially in the south. The result was a disaster, now made irreversible by the accelerating climate emergency.
“These are not reassuring rains but violent downpours, dumping a year’s worth of water in a few hours and triggering landslides,” Mulder warned. “With the Mediterranean among its hottest years on record in 2025, warmer seas are supercharging the atmosphere and fuelling extreme events like Cyclone Harry, which struck Niscemi and the rest of the island.”
The destructive force of Harry, with winds exceeding 60mph and seas whipped into waves reaching up to 15 metres, left a long trail of devastation in Sicily, destroying ports, damaging homes, tearing up roads and causing an estimated €2bn (£1.73bn) in losses.
Legambiente said that in 2025 alone, the island was hit by 45 extreme weather events, each significantly damaging public and private infrastructure.
In Niscemi, another flank of the town gave way. The city rests on a fragile clay base, and once again the ground slid downhill. An elderly couple, who for 10 days had been waiting for permission to retrieve a few clothes left behind, were turned back by firefighters. It was too dangerous, they were told, to venture into alleys already marked for collapse.
They walked back out of the red zone with their heads bowed. One of them shook her head, as if still negotiating with the reality. Tears came, quietly.
They knew they will have to wait longer before returning home. And they knew, more painfully still, that they may never return at all.
