my Marche
Landscapes and Architecture

If you come to our region for the first time, especially from the north or south of the Adriatic coast, what immediately catches your eye are these gentle green slopes that slope down towards the sea, their geometry, the squares and rectangles that rise and they descend marked or interrupted by rows of oaks and vineyards, ditches, reed thickets, patches of olive groves. This sort of optical chessboard is represented by the different crops.

In the film “Smoke of London” Alberto Sordi plays the part of an antiques dealer who, seeing the English countryside for the first time, says: “Here it's not like in Italy, the countryside is all green and restful, you see cows and sheep everywhere that they graze placidly and you have the idea that everything is falling from the sky, like a sort of heavenly manna, but here there isn't a field that isn't plowed, cultivated, worked. Here: with us the fields are synonymous with fatigue , here instead of relaxing”

Well, we can say that the Marche countryside fits perfectly into that image that our famous actor describes so well: the image of fatigue, of the work that the farmer carries out and which he has carried out even more laboriously in the past. Those geometries represent work , and therefore the effort but also give an idea of ​​organization and concreteness, which are a characteristic of the Marche people.

In any case, it is precisely these landscapes and these worked lands that communicate to us the sense of attachment to the land of its inhabitants.
If you then leave one of the many main roads and enter a country road, the white ones perhaps, narrow and dusty in summer, then you enter as if into a sort of frozen time machine: the large olive trees give shade and relief for some sleeping dogs and sheep half dazed by the heat, old and battered fences act as a watershed between the plowed fields and the few yellowed pastures while in the background the farmer's house dominates, strong and wrinkled like him, controlling the farm and its inhabitants.

What the farmhouse, today mostly in need of restoration, conveys to us first and foremost is an unaltered sense of belonging to this land, perhaps the only testimony miraculously left alive of our culture, of our history and deepest and most more common.

The message of his presence is a silent assent, which speaks more than any historical story full of emphasis on the characters who made the Marche and Italy, it is the narration of his daily life made up of renunciations and deprivations, of poverty and misery but not of desperation, of precise rules and hierarchies that have formed the social character of a population strongly attached to the territory.

In practice it is the farmhouse that narrates the psychological experience of eighteenth and nineteenth century man, upon entering you perceive the absence of It is when you enter a rural house that, in my opinion, you come into close contact with true history , which is the story of most of us, much more than if we entered castles and noble palaces and there is nothing other than her to represent the true symbol of the Marche, and of the way in which the individual has mediated with he governed the surrounding nature but did not bend it, he respected it but not indulged it in every way.

I wanted to write a brief summary of the history of the rural house in the Marche, which I discover is gradually becoming more and more interesting and engaging, precisely because even if I find it right that to keep these houses intact over time, a sort of renovation should be carried out that reflects the needs of the our times, albeit respecting the physiognomy and the overall vision, however I find it right to outline what was before.
It is known that the stables are all transformed into living areas and that the bedrooms are made higher up.
But what was it like before, in general?
More or less like all the houses that many of you have seen... The stable to the west, the cellars to the east, the pigsty under the stairs, the kitchen on the first floor in the center of the house, the vergaro (farmer) room above the stable , to govern and control even at night the greatest asset of a farm: the livestock.
But, despite the general outlines, I must say that I have rarely found a house that was the same as another, even though they were similar, they had some details that differentiated them.

The rural house has represented the most vivid expression of peasant civilization over the centuries in the Marche. The farmer, starting from the XNUMXth century. he uses it as his permanent home together with his family who helps him in the cultivation of the farm. The farm does not belong to him, he is a sharecropper, that is, linked by a contract to the landowner. The sharecropping contract provides that the farmer must work the land, look after the animals and give half of the proceeds to the owner. How this proceeds should be calculated, in wheat or flour, is part of the agreements of the parties who in general decide that the farmer must live in the house, maintain it decorously, provide shelter for animals, agricultural tools and supplies. The owner builds the farmhouse, the sharecropper takes care of its ordinary maintenance
The harvest must be divided in half. Often it is not the landowner who comes to count the stock directly but the factor, i.e. the owner's trusted man.
In the rural house there is a plurality of functions that must respond to the most diverse needs and it is precisely for this reason that the sharecropping house has become, over the years, increasingly complex and articulated, subjected to various transformations precisely to adapt it to the needs of the moment , both in the distribution of internal spaces and externally with the addition of new bodies, joined to the existing or autonomous or, as happened in the nineteenth century, demolishing old buildings and renovating new ones.

I found very large houses, where, especially here in the Jesino area, more than 40 people lived and I often wondered how they managed to live there, where was that privacy so essential nowadays and what psychological and behavioral mechanisms were triggered in a lifetime and in such an extended family and so forced to live together.

It was certainly not a commune, the one that was very fashionable in the sixties and seventies, where everyone was basically free to do and express themselves as they pleased (those who painted, those who improvised in ceramics, in short, what continues to do even now that we have freed ourselves from the primary need of hunger) We lived under the strict hierarchy and supervision of the capoccia or vergaro and of the vergara, we worked in the fields from early morning until evening, and the work in the fields was very hard, the women worked in the fields or spun, milked the cows, mended, made lunch (for all those people!) and looked after the little ones. In short, those houses came back to life for a moment, whether beautiful or ugly, but to life. While now they stood there, like abandoned dogs waiting for a new owner.
And then I also began to think that rural houses represent much more than what one might generally think. Despite their modest architecture, if we can talk about architecture, their presence in the area is so vast and numerous, consider that almost half of what exists today were destroyed in the past, they are testimony to a cultural heritage that it is not written anywhere - made up of gestures, words, thoughts, fears - but it has been handed down from generation to generation and which, and this may seem funny, has also affected those people and generations who had no peasant in their family or for family branches. The sense of saving, for example, showing little, modesty, a strong religiosity, a strong control of oneself and others, a certain coldness in showing one's feelings, especially of parents towards their children but, despite this, a strong attachment to family and roots with all the advantages and disadvantages that follow, and finally, a tendency towards rationality (the earth is concreteness) rather than towards dreams and illusion. All this is derived from peasant culture and certainly not bourgeois, we have little or nothing of bourgeois here in the Marche, and the tendency to cultivate one's own vegetable garden, as today many small industrialists cultivate their own factory, their own business, the marked individualism derives precisely from here. A mentality that today we are trying to overcome with strong education, with globalization, with the strong opening to the world that has occurred especially in recent years with the opening of the airport, but this characteristic remains very deep-rooted.
Therefore, even if I find it right that times and needs change, I sometimes look with tenderness at what is our past and that modern fashions and trends are transforming from a home of fatigue
home – finally! – of relaxation. Also because these buildings almost always have excellent locations.
Our peasant ancestor wasn't stupid after all! He didn't go looking for precarious jobs in the city, in unhealthy and overcrowded places, and therefore in comparison he was always better off than others. Even though he was always struggling with debts and the master who was crushing him, he always had somewhere to hide eggs or a chicken or a bowl of milk, he always had a pleasant place to live, full of sun and trees and water and lots of good air. . In short, poor yes but not stupid!

In the books I read I often found this phrase "We cannot speak of true architecture as these houses were mostly built by country laborers and only the farmhouses, after the second half of the nineteenth century, with the excellent investigations on situation of the Marche countryside carried out by the engineer Paolo Guerrieri from Macerata who understood the need to improve the living conditions of the farmer, outlining what should have been the divisions of the ideal farmhouse, directives which in any case were not always taken into consideration"

 

1) – Among the most widespread forms, two different types of farmhouses can be identified, those with outside stairs and those with internal staircase.

  1. a) – The internal staircase also called  house in solarowe find it further down the plain and towards the sea, the huts are asymmetrical with respect to the main facade, with a pitched roof.

The kitchen and bedrooms are on the first floor, as is the warehouse for supplies. The kitchen is the central place of the house, with the hearth called arola or rola. The stable is to the east, on the ground floor above the bedrooms, so that the farmer or vergaro (from verga, the one who holds the command) can also warn the smallest noise at night, when most cases of livestock theft occur. To the west is the cellar and the sheepfold, under the stairs is the pigsty or poultry shed.
Then there is the threshing floor, partly paved and partly in beaten earth, where the harvesting or threshing activities take place but is also a place for meetings and parties linked to the harvesting of the products of the fields.

  1. b) – The second type ofhouse is with external staircase , also in the hilly area that leads directly to the first floor and the kitchen. The staircase can be covered or uncovered, only in the upper part of the entrance landing of the house. For the rest of the interior it is the same as the house with the internal staircase: same division of the rooms, identical functions.

2) Another type of farmhouse which is mainly found in high hill areas is the House of slope. The latter has neither external nor internal staircase, the first floor is used as a dwelling while the basement part is a stable and cellar together.
It is built from a basement level towards the valley, the stable, and above, the actual house with kitchen, bedrooms, with the entrance from the higher road level appearing as a ground floor compared to the road.
This type of house is mainly made of local stone, gray or white pink depending on the area where it is located, however always in the most mountainous areas.

3)It should be mentioned separately square house with rather large rooms distributed over two floors.
They are few but very beautiful, they derive their origins from the oldest farmhouses and manor houses. They have more detailed architectural details and do not have the stable on the ground floor, indeed, in some cases the kitchen is located there while the bedrooms and the hall are on the upper floor.

The main façade has an arch-shaped entrance door, engraved with the date of the house's construction and brick frames.
Every time I have seen them I have always felt a sensation of majesty and concreteness. They sit on the tops of small hills or on the plains and have a sense of perspective, with the same number of windows on each side. They are undoubtedly very fascinating and I would recommend leaving the farmyard just as it once was, because in most cases they have a very ancient paving of terracotta tiles in front of them

4) to tower house then later transformed to diver It has very ancient origins, dating back to the 1500s and 1600s, initially built, in its most archaic forms which date back to the 1200s and 1300s, as a military type structure. Initially, this type of house, present more in internal and wooded areas, was conditioned by the fear, which was very well founded, of constant attacks and raids.
The tower house soared above the tall vegetation and allowed a view of the nearby hills.
The internal environments followed the same logic as the other typologies: stables and cellars on the ground floor, rooms and warehouse on the upper floors. It is only after 1600 that the tower house was transformed into a dovecote or diver's house, the tower becoming covered and used as a refuge for pigeons.
This type of house represents the most ambitious model among farm houses and therefore also the most expensive but its persistence over time also depends on the fact that pigeon breeding is appreciated not only for its meat but also for the production of the fertilizer considered an excellent fertilizer.

5) A further chapter extends for the maggot house, which spread around the early nineteenth century. Also due to the fact that silk processing factories develop around Jesi, and are present here in notable numbers. (Thanks to these factories, the "spinning mills" where many women found employment, a certain type of popular music developed which today has returned to light thanks to the study and research of Gastone Petrucci and the group of " At the Machine“. People who know this type of folk music know what I am talking about, this band is famous all over Italy).
Those who love the folk genre know well what I'm talking about, this group has become very famous throughout Italy)
Many shapes and sizes of these houses remain. Here I photograph only one, otherwise there is no space.
In sharecropping regimes, the cultivation of the silkworm, the silkworm, allows the land's labor to be used during periods of the year when agricultural activity is reduced.
Thus, different types of houses are built with raised maggots with a central or lateral plan, even if the most common is the one with a central plan, which is generally superimposed on the kitchen.
The maggot houses most often have gables and a  door windowcharacteristic, in a central position, with arched architrave and railing. The windows are large to provide greater ventilation and equipped with shutters in order to prevent strong sunlight in the room in the central hours of the day, otherwise the worm would be damaged.

6) A final mention goes to the so-called earthen houses. Earthen houses are built with very poor materials, such as earth and straw. This technique was very widespread in those times. But these houses have suffered continuous destruction, both due to the abandonment of the countryside and because they were considered a symbol of poverty.
Here too two distinctions must be made: the land house of the small owner and the land house of the labourer. In the first case the construction is independent.
There is a lot to say about earthen houses. Their way of being built is unique and therefore deserves a separate discussion. There is a large bibliography regarding this type of house.
A compound made of earth and straw was used, the processing was carried out mainly in spring and autumn because otherwise the heat would have dried out too much as well as the excessive frost of winter. Most of the time, formworks were used in which the mixture of earth and straw was placed or square blocks of earth were made and placed one on top of the other just like dry stones. The roof was made of a reed trellis placed on wooden beams on which a layer of earth and straw was spread and then the normal brick tiles were placed.
The only remaining earthen houses, also thanks to the Superintendence of Monuments, are in Serra dè Conti and San Paolo di Jesi. They have been renovated and can be admired in all their simplicity of workmanship.

 

In conclusion I have tried to summarize the different types of houses as much as possible in order to inform the visitor who comes looking for a farmhouse in our area to come and live there or to spend part of the year. I did not intentionally want to do a more in-depth search because I did not find this to be the most suitable place, but I hope I have somehow aroused an interest in you and I am sure that, in the future, when you find yourself in front of a rural house, you will look for immediately to give it a more accurate definition, you will ask yourself questions like I did, looking for traces and testimonies of a past that can no longer return, but which, thanks to all of us, can remain in the future, finding a different, certainly more serene, housing function.

Lorenza Cappanera, sociologist and history enthusiast.

 

Sergio Marinelli – architect and designer, expert in the history of rural architecture

 

 

If you come to our region for the first time, especially from the north or south of the Adriatic coast, what immediately catches your eye are these gentle green slopes that descend towards the sea. At a further glance, after perhaps having been led astray by the road or by the car next to us or by some architectural ugliness which, especially in the more urban areas, is never lacking, we notice the geometry of these gentle hills, the squares and rectangles that rise and fall and are marked or interrupted by rows of oak trees and vineyards, reed-filled ditches, patches of olive groves.

This geometry is represented by the different crops.
In the film “Smoke of London” Alberto Sordi plays the part of an antiques dealer who, seeing the English countryside for the first time, states: “Here it is not like in Italy, the countryside is all green and restful, you see cows and sheep everywhere grazing peacefully and you have the idea that everything falls from the sky, but here there isn't a field that isn't plowed, cultivated, worked. Here: with us the fields are synonymous with fatigue  , in the England of relaxation”

Well, we can say that the Marche countryside fits perfectly into that image that our famous actor describes so well: the image of fatigue, of the work that the farmer carries out and which he has carried out even more laboriously in the past. Those geometries represent work , and therefore the effort but also give an idea of ​​organization and practicality, which are a characteristic of the Marche people.

In any case, it is precisely these landscapes and these worked lands that communicate to us the sense of attachment to the land of its inhabitants.
If you then leave one of the many main roads and enter a country road, the white ones perhaps, narrow and dusty in summer, then you enter as if into a sort of time machine which seems to have stopped here: the large olive trees give shade and relaxation to some sleeping dogs and sheep half dazed by the heat, old and battered fences act as a watershed between the plowed fields and the few, yellowed, pastures and, to the side or in the background the rural house, strong and wrinkled like a old peasant woman who, despite her advanced age, is always there tirelessly checking on the farm.

In fact, if we try to follow the plowed furrows with our gaze, starting from the valley, to go up towards the ridges, we immediately notice that on the top there is always the farmhouse, which dominates that farm. The rural houses in the hills are evenly distributed and it is rare to find farms without houses.

What the rural house, today mostly in need of restoration, conveys to us first of all, is a sense, unchanged over time, of belonging to this land, perhaps the only testimony miraculously left alive of our culture, our history and deeper identity.
In fact, the rural house represents our Marche culture more than anything else, it tells us how we have been over time, with our strengths and weaknesses, of the relationships that existed within the family, of the family as the economic and social pivot of daily life, of the styles of life, of its rules and hierarchies for better or for worse which reflected the rules and hierarchies of the Marche society and more generally of central Italy.

It is when you enter a rural house that, in my opinion, you come into close contact with true history, which is the history of most of us, much more than if you entered castles and noble palaces and there is no it is none other than her who represents the true symbol of the Marche, and of the way in which the individual has mediated with the surrounding nature, has governed it but not bent it, has respected it but not indulged in everything and for everything.

I wanted to write a brief summary of the history of the rural house in the Marche, which I discover is gradually becoming more and more interesting and engaging, precisely because even if I find it right that to keep these houses intact over time, a sort of renovation should be carried out that reflects the needs of the our times, albeit respecting the physiognomy and the overall vision, however I find it right to outline what was before.
It is known that the stables are all transformed into living areas and that the bedrooms are made higher up.
But what was it like before, in general?
More or less like all the houses that many of you have seen... The stable to the west, the cellars to the east, the pigsty under the stairs, the kitchen on the first floor in the center of the house, the vergaro (farmer) room above the stable , to govern and control even at night the greatest asset of a farm: the livestock.
But, despite the general outlines, I must say that I have rarely found a house that was the same as another, even though they were similar, they had some details that differentiated them.

The rural house has represented the most vivid expression of peasant civilization over the centuries in the Marche. The farmer, starting from the XNUMXth century. he uses it as his permanent home together with his family who helps him in the cultivation of the farm. The farm does not belong to him, he is a sharecropper, that is, linked by a contract to the landowner. The sharecropping contract provides that the farmer must work the land, look after the animals and give half of the proceeds to the owner. How this proceeds should be calculated, in wheat or flour, is part of the agreements of the parties who in general decide that the farmer must live in the house, maintain it decorously, provide shelter for animals, agricultural tools and supplies. The owner builds the farmhouse, the sharecropper takes care of its ordinary maintenance
The harvest must be divided in half. Often it is not the landowner who comes to count the stock directly but the factor, i.e. the owner's trusted man.
In the rural house there is a plurality of functions that must respond to the most diverse needs and it is precisely for this reason that the sharecropping house has become, over the years, increasingly complex and articulated, subjected to various transformations precisely to adapt it to the needs of the moment , both in the distribution of internal spaces and externally with the addition of new bodies, joined to the existing or autonomous or, as happened in the nineteenth century, demolishing old buildings and renovating new ones.

I found very large houses, where, especially here in the Jesino area, more than 40 people lived and I often wondered how they managed to live there, where was that privacy so essential nowadays and what psychological and behavioral mechanisms were triggered in a lifetime and in such an extended family and so forced to live together.

It was certainly not a commune, the one that was very fashionable in the sixties and seventies, where everyone was basically free to do and express themselves as they pleased (those who painted, those who improvised in ceramics, in short, what continues to do even now that we have freed ourselves from the primary need of hunger) We lived under the strict hierarchy and supervision of the capoccia or vergaro and of the vergara, we worked in the fields from early morning until evening, and the work in the fields was very hard, the women worked in the fields or spun, milked the cows, mended, made lunch (for all those people!) and looked after the little ones. In short, those houses came back to life for a moment, whether beautiful or ugly, but to life. While now they stood there, like abandoned dogs waiting for a new owner.
And then I also began to think that rural houses represent much more than what one might generally think. Despite their modest architecture, if we can talk about architecture, their presence in the area is so vast and numerous, consider that almost half of what exists today were destroyed in the past, they are testimony to a cultural heritage that it is not written anywhere - made up of gestures, words, thoughts, fears - but it has been handed down from generation to generation and which, and this may seem funny, has also affected those people and generations who had no peasant in their family or for family branches. The sense of saving, for example, showing little, modesty, a strong religiosity, a strong control of oneself and others, a certain coldness in showing one's feelings, especially of parents towards their children but, despite this, a strong attachment to family and roots with all the advantages and disadvantages that follow, and finally, a tendency towards rationality (the earth is concreteness) rather than towards dreams and illusion. All this is derived from peasant culture and certainly not bourgeois, we have little or nothing of bourgeois here in the Marche, and the tendency to cultivate one's own vegetable garden, as today many small industrialists cultivate their own factory, their own business, the marked individualism derives precisely from here. A mentality that today we are trying to overcome with strong education, with globalization, with the strong opening to the world that has occurred especially in recent years with the opening of the airport, but this characteristic remains very deep-rooted.
Therefore, even if I find it right that times and needs change, I sometimes look with tenderness at what is our past and that modern fashions and trends are transforming from a home of fatigue
home – finally! – of relaxation. Also because these buildings almost always have excellent locations.
Our peasant ancestor wasn't stupid after all! He didn't go looking for precarious jobs in the city, in unhealthy and overcrowded places, and therefore in comparison he was always better off than others. Even though he was always struggling with debts and the master who was crushing him, he always had somewhere to hide eggs or a chicken or a bowl of milk, he always had a pleasant place to live, full of sun and trees and water and lots of good air. . In short, poor yes but not stupid!

In the books I read I often found this phrase "We cannot speak of true architecture as these houses were mostly built by country laborers and only the farmhouses, after the second half of the nineteenth century, with the excellent investigations on situation of the Marche countryside carried out by the engineer Paolo Guerrieri from Macerata who understood the need to improve the living conditions of the farmer, outlining what should have been the divisions of the ideal farmhouse, directives which in any case were not always taken into consideration"

 

1) – Among the most widespread forms, two different types of farmhouses can be identified, those with outside stairs and those with internal staircase.

  1. a) – The internal staircase also called  house in solarowe find it further down the plain and towards the sea, the huts are asymmetrical with respect to the main facade, with a pitched roof.

The kitchen and bedrooms are on the first floor, as is the warehouse for supplies. The kitchen is the central place of the house, with the hearth called arola or rola. The stable is to the east, on the ground floor above the bedrooms, so that the farmer or vergaro (from verga, the one who holds the command) can also warn the smallest noise at night, when most cases of livestock theft occur. To the west is the cellar and the sheepfold, under the stairs is the pigsty or poultry shed.
Then there is the threshing floor, partly paved and partly in beaten earth, where the harvesting or threshing activities take place but is also a place for meetings and parties linked to the harvesting of the products of the fields.

  1. b) – The second type ofhouse is with external staircase , also in the hilly area that leads directly to the first floor and the kitchen. The staircase can be covered or uncovered, only in the upper part of the entrance landing of the house. For the rest of the interior it is the same as the house with the internal staircase: same division of the rooms, identical functions.

2) Another type of farmhouse which is mainly found in high hill areas is the House of slope. The latter has neither external nor internal staircase, the first floor is used as a dwelling while the basement part is a stable and cellar together.
It is built from a basement level towards the valley, the stable, and above, the actual house with kitchen, bedrooms, with the entrance from the higher road level appearing as a ground floor compared to the road.
This type of house is mainly made of local stone, gray or white pink depending on the area where it is located, however always in the most mountainous areas.

3)It should be mentioned separately square house with rather large rooms distributed over two floors.
They are few but very beautiful, they derive their origins from the oldest farmhouses and manor houses. They have more detailed architectural details and do not have the stable on the ground floor, indeed, in some cases the kitchen is located there while the bedrooms and the hall are on the upper floor.

The main façade has an arch-shaped entrance door, engraved with the date of the house's construction and brick frames.
Every time I have seen them I have always felt a sensation of majesty and concreteness. They sit on the tops of small hills or on the plains and have a sense of perspective, with the same number of windows on each side. They are undoubtedly very fascinating and I would recommend leaving the farmyard just as it once was, because in most cases they have a very ancient paving of terracotta tiles in front of them

4) to tower house then later transformed to diver It has very ancient origins, dating back to the 1500s and 1600s, initially built, in its most archaic forms which date back to the 1200s and 1300s, as a military type structure. Initially, this type of house, present more in internal and wooded areas, was conditioned by the fear, which was very well founded, of constant attacks and raids.
The tower house soared above the tall vegetation and allowed a view of the nearby hills.
The internal environments followed the same logic as the other typologies: stables and cellars on the ground floor, rooms and warehouse on the upper floors. It is only after 1600 that the tower house was transformed into a dovecote or diver's house, the tower becoming covered and used as a refuge for pigeons.
This type of house represents the most ambitious model among farm houses and therefore also the most expensive but its persistence over time also depends on the fact that pigeon breeding is appreciated not only for its meat but also for the production of the fertilizer considered an excellent fertilizer.

5) A further chapter extends for the maggot house, which spread around the early nineteenth century. Also due to the fact that silk processing factories develop around Jesi, and are present here in notable numbers. (Thanks to these factories, the "spinning mills" where many women found employment, a certain type of popular music developed which today has returned to light thanks to the study and research of Gastone Petrucci and the group of " At the Machine“. People who know this type of folk music know what I am talking about, this band is famous all over Italy).
Those who love the folk genre know well what I'm talking about, this group has become very famous throughout Italy)
Many shapes and sizes of these houses remain. Here I photograph only one, otherwise there is no space.
In sharecropping regimes, the cultivation of the silkworm, the silkworm, allows the land's labor to be used during periods of the year when agricultural activity is reduced.
Thus, different types of houses are built with raised maggots with a central or lateral plan, even if the most common is the one with a central plan, which is generally superimposed on the kitchen.
The maggot houses most often have gables and a  door windowcharacteristic, in a central position, with arched architrave and railing. The windows are large to provide greater ventilation and equipped with shutters in order to prevent strong sunlight in the room in the central hours of the day, otherwise the worm would be damaged.

6) A final mention goes to the so-called earthen houses. Earthen houses are built with very poor materials, such as earth and straw. This technique was very widespread in those times. But these houses have suffered continuous destruction, both due to the abandonment of the countryside and because they were considered a symbol of poverty.
Here too two distinctions must be made: the land house of the small owner and the land house of the labourer. In the first case the construction is independent.
There is a lot to say about earthen houses. Their way of being built is unique and therefore deserves a separate discussion. There is a large bibliography regarding this type of house.
A compound made of earth and straw was used, the processing was carried out mainly in spring and autumn because otherwise the heat would have dried out too much as well as the excessive frost of winter. Most of the time, formworks were used in which the mixture of earth and straw was placed or square blocks of earth were made and placed one on top of the other just like dry stones. The roof was made of a reed trellis placed on wooden beams on which a layer of earth and straw was spread and then the normal brick tiles were placed.
The only remaining earthen houses, also thanks to the Superintendence of Monuments, are in Serra dè Conti and San Paolo di Jesi. They have been renovated and can be admired in all their simplicity of workmanship.

 

In conclusion I have tried to summarize the different types of houses as much as possible in order to inform the visitor who comes looking for a farmhouse in our area to come and live there or to spend part of the year. I did not intentionally want to do a more in-depth search because I did not find this to be the most suitable place, but I hope I have somehow aroused an interest in you and I am sure that, in the future, when you find yourself in front of a rural house, you will look for immediately to give it a more accurate definition, you will ask yourself questions like I did, looking for traces and testimonies of a past that can no longer return, but which, thanks to all of us, can remain in the future, finding a different, certainly more serene, housing function.

Lorenza Cappanera, sociologist and history enthusiast.

 

Sergio Marinelli – architect and designer, expert in the history of rural architecture

 

 

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