HERITAGE AND TERRITORY: THE «MASSAE» IN THE RURAL AREAS OF SOUTHERN ITALY

The masserias (buildings farms) identify those residential-productive-rural constructions typical of Southern Italy, having the characteristics that the Latin etymology of the term contains: “massae”, i.e. block, a set of rural buildings, usually surrounding courtyards or less extensive, each with different intended uses, but constituting a single corporate or legal reality [1]. The term masseria, therefore, reveals a precise meaning, better determined over time, as a logistic center of the productive activities of the rural economy, as an autonomous company with a large estate orientation, linked to the cultivation of the field sand/or to the breeding of animals; it will be precisely the prominence of one of the two main activities, the alternation between these two orientations, that will define, in its general lines, the typological structure of the farms and their formal image. Of course, it takes different forms and types also depending on the geographic allocation, morphological, environmental and cultural characteristics of the site, population loads and levels of social and urban organization of the territories. Moreover, in the very long historical evolution of these settlements, other functions, always largely deriving from the political-economic contingencies of the territories they belonged to, have ended up declining their function: from markedly proto-urban residential, in the periods of the city's decline (from the Roman empire to the early Middle Ages), to defensive functions (from medieval 'castra' to the 'fortified' farms of more recent times), to religious ones (abbey sand convents, hermitages and monasteries). Within this important typological-constructive variety, through a study carried out mainly in the rural area of Matera and its surroundings, it was possible to identify some specific typologies of the geographical areas to which they belong (Murgia; coastal; inland); researches on materials, construction techniques and functional schemes, analysis of failures and pathologies were carried out; interventions of recovering and functional reuse, compatible with the architectural-constructive characteristics of the building and their landscape surroundings, were proposed, aimed at the conservation, use and promotion of important prodromes of the history and heritage of Lucanian constructive tradition.