ANCIENT VILLAGES
Almost all the
mountain centeres of Abruzzo, sitting tight and
protected on the peaks, were wise in choosing
their geographical setting and own morphology
for two reasons: the extreme danger of the
Middle Ages, a period in which the majority of
these villages arose, and the business (but it
could be said mono-culture) of sheep farming,
that has its kingdom in the mountains. Built
entirely of live stone and mud, with a total,
phobic absence of wood, the old villages of the
Abruzzo mountains express its obsessive
attachment to stone, typical of the
Mediterranean civilization. These houses of bare
stone, built close to one another, forming a
compact, protective wall (therefore called
"case-mura", wall-houses), are communicating
their never-ending, anguishing need of defense
in a world of extended, feudal anarchy, of the
critical evasion of the central powers and
therefore, the lack of organized systems of
defense.
On
the exterior perimeter of the houses enclosed
the village in a civilian (none the less
effective), defensive circle. On the outside
there are few windows, almost as narrow as
slits, placed in the upper floors. A direct
consequence of the dangerous times, the so
called "defence barriers" represented the only
solid system of self-defence for the local
population. Real, fortified villages more than
just castles, these allowed a prolonged,
defensive retreat for the people, if necessary.
On
the exterior perimeter of the houses enclosed
the village in a civilian (none the less
effective), defensive circle. On the outside
there are few windows, almost as narrow as
slits, placed in the upper floors. A direct
consequence of the dangerous times, the so
called "defence barriers" represented the only
solid system of self-defence for the local
population. Real, fortified villages more than
just castles, these allowed a prolonged,
defensive retreat for the people, if necessary.
For a very long
space of time, going from the XI century to the
French revolution, this type of urban plan
formed a typical model of a civilized settlement
in the Abruzzo mountains. Nevertheless it is
difficult to understand the sense of these human
settlements, often pushed to the limits of
habitability without putting them back in their
place in that system of economic production that
organizes, in its entirety, all life in the
mountains: sheep farming. In actual fact, as an
economic activity predominant in Abruzzo for
almost three millenniums, therefore the origin
of a particular condition of life, the sheep
farming has made an impression on the territory
not just limited to prints left in the pastures
and sheep tracks. The great majority of the
sheep, the huge flocks that periodically moved
from the upper pastures in the mountains to the
coastal plains of the Peninsula, are completely
unconnected with the inhabited centre: the
transhumant sheep always live out in the open.
They represented, however, a sort of additional
capital that never became directly part of the
life or urban plan of the mountain villages. The
actual style of each single house reflects this
economy tied to a type of breeding which is
based on large herds of small animals. The
impossibility of moving this patrimony to the
centre of the village, the need of defence which
tended to limit the extension of the centre to
be protected, and the steepness of the slopes,
made a particular housing structure necessary in
the shape of buildings with three, four, or even
five or six rooms, one on top of the other.
