CIATU DI LU ME CORI – FINALE, MUNICIPALITY OF POLLINA 2025
Rosa Balistreri is the immensely powerful voice of Sicily. She is a rebellious and poetic woman. She is the voice that has narrated the naked soul of our people, crying out against injustice with the rough sweetness of folk tradition. She is a voice that returns. A wound that sings. She is Rosa, the storyteller of the soul, still calling us back to what truly matters: the people, the land, dignity. A voice that does not give in, a voice that rises for those who cannot. To you, Rosa, who took the ancient tears of our island and transformed it into a rebel song, who took folk traditions and turned them into a civil outcry, a secular prayer, a truth of the people. This painting is for you. But not only. It is for all the women of our Sicily, who continue, today as yesterday, to raise their voices with dignity. Women who carry the weight of history on their shoulders and turn it into beauty, into fight, into light.
