Official website

Nino was a bricklayer and lived in the outskirts of Palermo with his family. Now he lives alone on top of a mountain and he is a prophet. He calls himself Isravele, the backward version of “elevarsi”, which in Italian means “to rise up”. Up there, on a barren mountain on the edge of the city, is his home: an old abandoned observatory that over the course of twenty years of tireless solitary work he has transformed into a portentous naive temple, considered one of the most impressive examples of outsider art in Europe. Isravele goes up and down every day with a backpack loaded with pebbles and concrete. It brings up what is below and thus purifies it. He transforms neglect into beauty, through a constant, almost inhuman work. This is his prayer, his message to the society that besieges him, down there: pilgrims and tourists threaten the peace of this place on the edge of the suburbs by going up to visit it in search of a photo or a selfie: they want to find out who this mysterious man is, who in the city is called the hermit.