Matera (Basilicata, Southern Italy): a European Model of Reuse, Sustainability and Resilience

Advances in Economics and Business 4(1): 26-36, 2016 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/aeb.2016.040104 Matera (Basilicata, Southern Italy): A European Model of Reuse, Sustainability and Resilience Marcello Bernardo*, Francesco De Pascale Department of Languages and Educational Sciences, University of Calabria, Italy Copyright © 2016 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract Europe is facing a severe crisis: old certainties you could see, from above, a white church. It was Santa are crumbling and traditional ways of working are showing Maria de Idris, and it looked like as if it was stuck into the signs of profound weakness. The first challenge, perhaps the ground. These inverted cones, these funnels, are locally most important, is to manage an advanced economy to known as “Sassi” [litt: “stones”]. Their shape reminded me generate not only economic value, but also social justice and of what, while at school, we imagined Dante's Inferno environmental quality. The second major issue is to promote might have looked like. The narrow space between the the adoption by civil society and institutions of an “ethos” facades and the slope accommodated roads, which serve as within which citizens could plan, produce and co-create their basements for those who come out from the top floor cities, cultivating a new and more rich democratic awareness. houses, and as roofs for those below. Looking up, I could Thirdly, it is about creating a climate of openness that finally see the whole of Matera as a slanting wall. It is enhances creative problem solving and provide a platform to really a beautiful city, picturesque and impressive». think, plan and act together, with courage. Matera has what it Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli [1] takes to meet these challenges. Matera’s story is told from its streets, its buildings, its monuments. They tell a story of ingenuity and resilience, disgrace and redemption, tinged by a deep sense of shame. The characters in this story are 1. Introduction “Sassi”, which for over thirty years were left to decay, was a The writer Carlo Levi (1902-1975), in the novel that synonym of “national shame” and was the emblem of a made him famous, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945) (1), southern backwater, in conflict with modernity. The describes Matera as a city that is no longer able to sustain awareness of its inhabitants of their age-old tradition, based that ecosystem that had worked during the preceding on the ability to inhabit inhospitable places, to create a centuries; he pleaded for the recovery and the revival of this harmonious relationship with territory, has prompted many city already since the 1940s. Levi's words refer to his own young people to return to inhabit the “Sassi” and to make visit to the city, when the Sassi were at the peak of misery them become “World Heritage Site” in 1993. Twenty years and social decline. The collapse, however, did not occur later, grandchildren of those brave young people have suddenly. It started between the second half of the proposed to community a new victorious challenge: help to eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, with make Matera 2019 European Capital of Culture. the decline and the disappearance of sheep and goat Keywords Matera, Resilience, Reuse, Sassi, husbandry and of the protection of transhumance. This Sustainability coincided with the industrial revolution and with the colonization of entire continents, through which the implementation of a new division of labor on a global scale came about. Australia came to dominate the market as the «I arrived to Matera at about eleven in the morning. I had largest wool manufacturer and became the main supplier of read in my guide book that it is a picturesque town worth the English textile industry, which absorbed much of the visiting; there is a museum of ancient art and some curious international wool production. The fall in wool exports cave dwellings [that is: carved into the rock]. As I started towards England destroyed the economic relevance of the walking away from the train station, I came to a road that agro-pastoral system; throughout the country, regulations had one side lined with old houses, while the other ran and institutions designed to protect grazing rights and along a precipice. Matera lies in that deep furrow. The transhumance came to an end. At Matera, during the shape of that ravine was peculiar; it looked like two half eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the modern city funnels positioned side by side, separated by a small expands along the flat terrain that bordered the edge of the outcrop and united at their base by a common peak, where ravine by developing imposing administrative and religious Advances in Economics and Business 4(1): 26-36, 2016 27 buildings right where the ancient city used to have its of an original sin, the more serious the less we had realised businesses and its grains and water storage systems. The its existence: pits, barns, tanks, common wells, and the gardens located «... Inside those black holes through the earthen on the flats, which constituted crucial centres of the Sassi walls I could see the beds, the poor furnishings, rags infrastructural system, became buried and hidden from the lying about. Dogs, sheeps, goats and pigs were lying streets and palaces belonging to the new physiognomy of on the floor. Each family usually possessed just one power [2]. This period, witnessed by Raffaele Giura Longo [3, 4, 5] set the basis for a radical divide between the upper of the caves and they would all sleep together, men, and the lower part of town. A marked difference stems out women, children and animals ... There was an between the "peasant conditions", which became infinity of children ... naked or in rags ... I saw discriminated against by rest of the city. The ending of children sitting in the doorway of their homes, in customary community agreements of space management, the dirt, under the scotching sun, their eyes hygiene maintenance, and waste recycling, determined half-closed and their eyelids red and swollen. It was degraded and unhealthy conditions. The balance between trachoma. I knew that there was this kind of disease available resources and the living space, which had given down here, but I was touched by seeing it among shape and size to houses and to the city it, became the filth and the misery, it was a different thing ... compromised. A process began, that progressively created And the flies would rest on their eyes but they the contemporary expansions of the urban area above the seemed not to mind ... their young faces wrinkled watershed lines, on top of the clays and of the springs that like old men and with a skeletal appearance due to in the past had always been spared. The Sassi that had the hunger: the hair full of lice and scabs ... Thin constituted the city became a refuge neighborhood, women with malnourished dirty infants attached to subordinated, inadequate, and saturated. This process their withered breasts ... it felt like being in the reached its peak in 1952, when the then prime minister, middle of a city hit by plague ... » [1]. Alcide De Gasperi, enacted a special law to order the In addition to Levi’s work of, numerous artists described evacuation of the Sassi. The inhabitants of Matera were forced to abandon their homes and to relocate to new homes the strong sense of decay and decline in the quality of life of in new neighborhoods; this event underlined a condition of the inhabitants of Matera in literature and in cinema. One of long-term hardship and deeply frustrating social disorder. these is the portray made by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) The discovery made by Carlo Levi on behalf of an entire of the Sassi of Matera and the Murgia Nature Park, in his generation of Italian intellectuals was interpreted as a shock, film The Gospel according to Matthew. It was realised a kind of trauma. The story of his first visit to the Sassi was entirely in Matera in 1964, in order to contribute to the entrusted to the sister of the writer, that is: to a second development and to the revitalization not only of Matera, narrator, therefore to someone who might have written in a but of all of the Basilicata Region (Figure 1) at international far more objective manner. Matera appears as the discovery scale. 28 Matera (Basilicata, Southern Italy): A European Model of Reuse, Sustainability and Resilience Figure 1. Basilicata (southern Italy). The geographic position of Matera Source: Google Maps All these witnesses, despite being different from each objects (e.g. metals) that can withstand shock and dynamic other, were united under a same goal: to bring back dignity loads even out of the ordinary, without losing their integrity to the Sassi, to re-establish their glory and their historical [9]. Similarly, the concept of resilience was introduced in and cultural importance, revamping Matera’s prestige psychological sciences during the seventies [10, 11, 12] to vaunted in medieval and modern times when descriptions indicate the ability of individuals to show appropriate levels full of admiration and appreciation for the beauty of the city of competence after exposure to adversity and to significant abounded. In the twelfth century, Matera is described as difficulties [13, 14]. Applying these concepts to the realm being magnificent and full of splendour by the Muslim of geography we shall use them with regard to natural geographer El Idrisi who compiled for the Norman King disasters, but more generally to changes taking place in the Roger of Sicily, his famous description of the Earth.

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