Re_Form Matera Re_Using The Modern

The history of the city of Matera can be read as the continue search for a process of contamination over time between the reuse, recycle and downsizing of the processes and materials of nature, urbanity and countryside. In the history of the Mediterranean, as Braudel reminds us, fortifications were continuously built, demolished and rebuilt. The urban walls, that represented a huge effort for the citizens, periodically over time became obsolete, useless as bulwarks but still usable as quarries, providing stones to be shaped in new construction materials. Likewise, in Matera, the transformation of the slopes karst in inhabited grottos, as well as houses for animals and humans, shows a strategy of reuse.