The Great Palermo

Every day a little boy from Palermo, Gaetano, is sent by his mother to buy eggs at the market, and each new day brings new crossroads and “detours” along the way, which will lead him to discover 19 landmarks of his city.

With each taste of food, Gaetano visually “mutates” into characters from the city’s collective imagination, in a continuous metamorphosis through the centuries, from place to place, from food to food, from character to character.

The narrative changes according to the choices made by the player: an initially very simple story is gradually enriched with new elements that make it richer and more complex, as in a “cumulative” ballad that expands from stanza to stanza.

A celebration of diversity, creative chaos and cosmic madness, The Great Palermo‘s artwork was featured in 2016 in an exhibition-path of interactive installations at the city’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna.

The Great Palermo is a “zero-kilometer” videogame experiment: the project was prototyped in the very city it is about, during the I ART residency program, and with the collaboration of local artists such as the Almendra Music collective, who wrote the original soundtrack.