In the 50's the Italian Parliament passed a special law for the evacuation of the two ancient suburbs of Matera: the Sassi. Even if there were many towns in the same conditions of Matera, the public attention was all focused on the Sassi. Matera was described as an eyesore, a degradation symbol of peasant life not redeemed yet to modernity, the subordination of Southern rural masses. It was often quoted a famous passage of Carlo Levi's novel "Christ stopped at Eboli": Inside those black holes; beds, miserable ornaments, hung out rags. On the floor dogs, sheep, goats, pigs. Each family uses a cave as her home and men, women, children, animals sleep together. They live so.....
20,000 people lived there discriminated. They were called Sassaioli which means troglodytes. The exodus began in the 60's and lasted long time. People moved into modern uncomfortable blocks of flats. Water ran only a few hours daily; it is little nowadays as well. During summer it is unbearably hot but the Sassi's inhabitants preferred them to the caves like Africans prefer as roof iron sheet to straw even though they roast beneath it: they were conditioned to choose so.
During the 70's, architecture texts were full of embarrassing cases even amusing ones on the Sassi inhabitants cleaning the olives in the toilets because they didn't know what they were for. But such observation could mean noticing only the horseflies in a Saharan village, the apparent misery, children rolling about the sand while not paying attention that the dark houses are functional to the environment, the dunes are settled according to winds, the oasis is alive not for Allah's will rather for a perfect irrigation system otherwise it would die. Life is set up over long periods on fear of a famine, a disaster that will soon or later come. The oasis inhabitants refuse the cloned palm trees that World Bank wants to impose. They know that in case of diseases all of them will disappear. Life is diversification!
Around Matera, farmers cultivate scattered pieces of land. Any economist would argue that is more convenient to group land through exchanges among farmers. This phenomenon seems to some sociologists as an extension of the Southern Italian attitude "amoral familism" or better say mean selfishness, non-existent cooperation, not mutual help out of family nucleus. The answer is not so simple: if in a field the harvest was scarce, in adifferently exposed one could be better. Wise and longtime planning.
The inversion of tendency for Sassi began when the exodus was almost over. An immense dead city hit by a sudden collapse, not seismic but cultural, like the cities near Cuzco. Really impressive! Some years ago, Cesare Brandi, architecture professor at Bari University, had the intuition that Sassi's primordial chaos concealed an endless number of very sophisticated technical solutions. Now it is acknowledged that Sassi were unique and like the historical centers of Florence, Rome and Venice, also Matera's Sassi are on U.N.E.S.C.O. world heritage list. From national shame to international cultural heritage!
However what is impressive about the Sassi it is not the endless number of caves but the shape variety, the intertwining passages, the architectural extensions naturalness and nobility: arches, tympana: real constructions! When the Sassi inhabitants moved out, almost everybody gave up the ownership to Matera's town council. Now they are planning to sell them but the social structure remaking is a far more difficult task than architectural restoring. All caves are inclined downward to allow sunray to reach up the farthest walls.
According to some architects it was a mistake considering the Sassi as simple shelters of a peasant medieval civilization unable to plan anything else; on the contrary they are a very ancient form of settlement, extraordinarily functional and largely spread in Southern Italy, Northern Africa, Anatolia and Middle East, that evolved to Mediterranean house with central patio: the Berber house, the Roman peristyles, the Arab central court. The same models are traceable in the Neolithic agglomerates of Beida (Jordan and Palestine) in the central well houses of Matmata (Tunisia) in the monoliths of Dongolo (Eritrea) in the subsoil towns of Cappadocia (Turkey). In Petra (Jordan) and Matera, the water collecting system was almost identical even though in Petra there is the architectural magnificence that Matera doesn't have.
The pastoral economy used the Sassi riverbeds as climatic and defensive protection. In arid climate where precipitations are concentrated in a restricted period, the main problem is water collection and storage. So they organized a terrace system that broke off the destructive water flow and fertilized the soil. The town matrix was made by basic elements: caves, limestone buildings, hanging gardens, channels and cisterns. The houses were around the cisterns and each of them had a name. Some elders still remember them. Later the social system evolved and so they built cold chambers to store provisions, granaries, shelters for animals; and churches, monasteries and finally farms, hamlets, castles. This organization stood up almost intact until the end of the 18th century as represented on the fresco of the Archbishop palace vault dated 1750. Between the second half of the 18th and beginning of 19th century, sheep farming began to decline. Australia had the wool monopoly and England played master and lord on trading and fabric making. 100 years earlier, Matera was described as a metaphor on Earth, a mirror of cosmic harmony: at night hundreds of lanterns turned on like a starry sky! Now shepherds become farmers and the precarious balance on which the community had lived, was broken off until the final degradation during the first half of 20th century.
The reconstruction is not that simple. The houses will have electricity and some architects plan to collect and filter water by using the cisterns. But how does a condensation cistern work? The Saharan tumuli are natural condensers; the nocturnal dew condenses inside the tumulus and goes down the underneath chamber. When the sun rises, instead of drying up the water, he speeds up the transformation process. According to archaeologists that's why the tumuli are holy and became burial places: they mean that a place of death is also a place of rebirth, of life. In ancient times a sacred function always came after a practical one. About the condensation cistern, scientist know very little. in many circumstances the ancient Gods are dead and it is impossible to resuscitate them!
Author & Designer: Simeone Andrulli
tymbaryon@gmail.com
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