Between earth and sky. The medieval house in the districts around Vesuvius

Abstract

The history of built spaces tells of the complex relationship that man has established both with the soil and with the environment in which he built his home. Furthermore, it tells of a whole series of mental contents due to the process of understanding, from an existential point of view, the complex phenomena in which he lived and which he had to overcome even when they manifested themselves in a mysterious way, so much so that they were not immediately understood. The phenomenological aspect of human experience is, in many ways, promptly recorded in the construction of the residence in which man offered shelter and comfort to his family unit. Finding in the traditional residence of the regional territory extended around the volcano Vesuvius some of the archaic solutions used to exorcise the wild and violent nature that instilled fear in man and which instead had to be tamed, gives rise to a path of understanding the phenomenon and justifies some of the aspects that are still present in building contexts and which need to be strongly protected. In fact, in this territory, important remains of medieval residences persist which have, not only in their form but also in their construction concept, archetypal principles that restore a world rich in reference to cosmologies and also to some narratives that would seem to come directly from the Old Testament. On the other hand, the same end of Pompeii and Herculaneum, destroyed and buried by a rain of fiery lapilli ash, like Sodom and Gomorrah, tells of a coexistence with the territory and with the environment which had, necessarily, to create constructive experiences that they themselves became ‘antidote’ to the bad seed of conflict with the environment. The medieval house in Campania, in fact, retains a whole series of technical features that make it a plastic explanation of the desire to accommodate atmospheric agents in order to draw from them the lifeblood for existence. The same materials used for the construction of the houses remain found and recovered from the ground with the important design organization which contemplates, together with the excavation of the foundations, the resilient creation of a cistern into which to convey the rainwater expertly captured by the vaulted extrados surface which collects the greatest possible quantity of the water resource rained from the sky. Even in this experience the archaic foundation of the world narrated by the book of Genesis seems to recur when on the second day the Eternal Father separated “the waters that are under the firmament from those that are above the firmament”. Similarly, the same intermediate floor of the houses, created with the use of chestnut trees - using the trunks as beams and the branches as closing boards between the centers - re-proposes the hospitable, and therefore propitiatory and benign, welcome of the patriarch Abraham who, at the oaks of Mamre, welcomed the Lord with his angels under the trees, before he went to personally verify what was happening in Sodom. The proposed contribution, by investigating the built space of the residence, intends to restore the cultural reasons underlying the cultural relationships between man’s spiritual expectations and his secular contingencies.