A mountain that lets itself be dug

At Gessopalena they did not build a village on the rock: they built it inside. Then, in two days of December 1943, almost nothing was left.

Six million years ago the sill of Gibraltar closed and the Mediterranean began to evaporate. The salts dissolved in the water grew concentrated and settled on the sea floor: that is how the gypsum that today crops out all along the Aventino valley was formed.

It is a rock you can scratch with a fingernail. On the Mohs scale it comes second, just behind talc. And when it is made of large crystals — selenite, which can take the shape of a spearhead or a swallow's tail — it catches the sun so well that the people of Gessopalena call their village “Pretalucente”, the shining stone.

Building by taking away

Whoever settled on that rock did not do as people did elsewhere. They did not quarry stone in order to pile it up: they dug into the mountain. Houses, streets, alleys, stairways, cellars, churches, stables, ovens, oil mills — all of it cut into the living rock.

The trappeto — the oil mill — still has the manger where the donkeys that turned the millstone rested, the block on which the lower stone sat, the hearth sunk into the rock for heating, the cave where the olives were stacked, the cistern that separated water from oil, and the hollow for the counterweight of the beam press, the frantoio “a trabocco”. In the stables you can still find the bases of the wine presses, known in the village as “vriscule”: a system in use from the Italic period until after the Second World War.

A softness that has its price

The very softness that made digging possible made everything precarious. Landslides followed one another — the worst in the 19th century — and earthquakes persuaded the inhabitants to build new districts down in the valley. Then, on 4 and 5 December 1943, German troops falling back on the Gustav Line razed the settlement to the ground.

A trade that ended

Around the rock the quarries remain, with chisel marks and the holes for blasting powder still legible on the cut stone. And the kilns: from the oldest, made out of natural caves, to those with one or two shafts, built of brick and gypsum stone. Inside them are still the heavy millstones the donkeys turned to crush the fired gypsum, and in the more recent ones the remains of electric crushers. In the final period, cableways ran down from the quarries.

Then, within a few decades, changed social conditions and the arrival of other building materials brought it all to an end. Of an entire culture — houses made of gypsum, plasters, stuccoes, false ceilings mixed with canes, straw and rushes — what is left is an empty village and a museum with no rooms of its own, because the rooms are the houses.

It is worth looking at closely: it is the bio-architecture of the past, and it still has something to say about the present.