Those who look at it see a bank, but those who know how to read it find the whole of Sicily: the Bank of Italy in Catania.

I am a monolith of gray, born in the decade when architecture stopped apologizing for its strength. I do not hide the marks of the formwork on my reinforced concrete skin, and the thousand openings are my eyes that gaze upon the city; I am as honest as a theorem, rigid as the discipline I guard.

Inside me, there are not only coins, but the heartbeat of the nation's economy is monitored. I am an extension of the State, a fortress of numbers and stability that observes Catania with the detachment of one built to last longer than dreams. Yet, my nature of concrete is not as deaf as it seems.

For some time now, my severity has ceased to be an impassable wall. Chiara Capobianco has etched a window that wasn't there onto my gray epidermis. It is a mural that softens me, a kind of colorful tattoo that tells the frenzy of San Berillo, the neighborhood that was gutted to accommodate me as well. There, in that two-dimensional structure where laundry hangs and lives intertwine, Etna is not a danger, but a protective pyramid that embraces the houses. Thanks to those colors, I have stopped being just a boundary; now I am a dialogue between the rigidity of power and the vertigo of the street.

But my true soul is enclosed where the sun does not reach. I hold a palimpsest of visions that contradicts my coldness. In my rooms, the Sicilian landscape ceases to be concrete and becomes pure light. On my walls, the absolute horizons of Piero Guccione open up, where the sea is a line that separates being from non-being, and the clods of earth of Elio Romano, which smell of sulfur and an ancient agriculture that sculpted the hills before I was born. I carry within me the memory of the travelers of the Eighteenth Century, imprinted in a print of the Etna that smokes with Enlightenment elegance, and the wonder of a Messina of the seventeenth century, a view so clear of the waterfront and the port rich with sailing ships that it seems a mirage of the Flemish Casembrot that the people of Messina keep in their museum, but which here finds a different silence.

Those who look at me from the outside see a central bank, a concrete authority that does not allow mistakes. Those who know how to read me, however, discover that my imposing presence and the rigidity of my shell are merely an armor to protect the beauty that I hold: that of a neighborhood that dances on my walls and that of a Sicily painted that, within me, will never know the shadow of sunset.

Liceo Classico Mario Cutelli