The patron of Gibellina is Saint Roch, celebrated on 16 August. The town that celebrates him, though, is a new town: today's Gibellina, also known as Gibellina Nuova, rose after the 1968 Belice earthquake about eleven kilometres as the crow flies from where it had stood before.
The old centre, destroyed by the quake, was abandoned, and in the 1980s the artist Alberto Burri turned it into the Cretto, a land art work that retraces the streets and alleys of the vanished town. It was mayor Ludovico Corrao who had the idea of «humanising» the reconstruction by calling world-famous artists to Gibellina: besides Burri, Pietro Consagra, Mario Schifano, Andrea Cascella, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Mimmo Paladino, Franco Angeli and Leonardo Sciascia answered the call, and the town became a diffuse museum. Since 1981 the Orestiadi have been held here every year, an international festival ranging from theatre to music, from painting to sculpture, to cinema, organised by the Fondazione Orestiadi.
