The text presented here first appeared in the volume Pietre e mattoni nel paesaggio rurale, (Ali&no, Perugia, 2008) in the series Arte e architettura – Studi e restauri, promoted by the Fondazione per l'Istruzione Agraria in Perugia, which we thank for allowing us to republish it.

Places set apart have always existed. Set apart for work, for private life, for study, for consumption… Today, in particular, functional needs, custom and zoning plans sanction a clear separation: home or work, residential district or industrial area, dwelling or farm.
In other ages the home/work pairing often arose not as an antinomy but rather as a complementarity. We know of the ancient distinction between otium and negotium, but it was a distinction devised by the upper classes, and it "set them apart". At the more common levels the two moments blended together. It is upon this integration of functions that many works of architecture were laid out.
One exemplary type above all is that of the typical medieval town house in our territory: a building running from ground to sky, its front on the street, attached along its flanks to other, similar houses. On the upper floors was the part reserved for the family's life, reached through a narrow door followed at once by a staircase that rose very steeply to gain space and, if need be, ease of defence. Beside this opened another, far wider door, often fitted with a rail that took up half of it and served as display and sales counter. This was the "shop" on the ground floor.
To reaffirm the close bond between the two parts, there was never lacking, inside, in the wall between the two entrances, a communicating opening. Indeed, it was through this, and the consequent passage through the shop, that the daily coming and going between the house and the outside must have taken place, if the narrow little door that even today, along the streets of our old town centres, stands beside the wider one gave rise to the legend, very plausible on the symbolic level, of being little used by the living and reserved only for the departure on the last journey, the one inside the coffin.
If this is what happens in the urban context, in the rural one the closeness and integration of functions is even more necessary and complex. Our farmhouse, in full use until the mid-1950s, is inhabited by a large family understood as a social nucleus but also as a working unit. Relationships, affections, hierarchies, roles and tasks find in that house their projection into space. In turn the highly varied activities of cultivation, breeding, processing, preserving, maintenance and often the very making of the tools caused perfect substructures, suited to their specific purposes and extremely varied, to proliferate. All of them, like the organs of a single body, were interdependent, inscribed in the cycle of production and of continuous recycling.
In this world, unlike our own, marked by contiguity in space and continuity in time, there is no doubt that an ancient and complex elaboration must have presided over the definition of boundaries. That the limits, the procedures for crossing them, their impassability in certain cases, were recognised and respected by all.
A world in which the young and the old, men and animals, scents and stench, Carnival and Lent, life and death lived closely together needed, in the absence of physical distances, invisible and very solid fences. That could only be a world with a strong sense of boundaries. "Come through, come through into the house!": with this formula the welcome guest was invited. "To come through", to cross the threshold, to take that single step that marks the difference between inside and outside. How decisive is a step, how powerful a word?
By day, the house door used neither keys nor bolts: the unwritten rules of good manners were enough. By night, however, it was firmly barred. In certain cases one can still see, on the side jambs, two little holes as wide as the head of a bar: there the bolt found its socket and its resistance. There were solid fastenings against wrongdoers, but one did not forget to place on the threshold a little bag of salt against those who laugh at bars and bolts. If (God forbid!) invisible and unwelcome visitors had come astride a broom, there they had to stop, compelled by their own magic to count one by one all those grains. And so, counting and counting, the night passed, the cock crowed, and the world of darkness drew back once more from that of the living without having done any harm.
The only opening allowed, indeed obliged, even in the sturdiest door was a round hole cut low down, the gattaiola, made expressly for the cat's wanderings. As in the days of ancient Egypt, the great defender of granaries and larders had its fundamental role and free passage to carry it out. Of certain houses it was also said, in a low voice, that the gattaiola sometimes served as a spyhole against the Werewolf. His wretched wife, on moonlit nights, must never open the door to her husband without first checking his hand through that hole to see that hair and nails had disappeared and that he had regained human form.

The roof was another powerful boundary. Two crossed roof-tiles buried under the earth among the fields were enough to mark the "boundaries" between one property and another. Invisible, yet impossible to move and therefore sure witnesses. They would be dug up when needed, in the extreme case of an irremediable dispute, in the presence of the two adjoining owners.
It seems, too, that sometimes women who had just given birth, in haste or forced to leave the house before the forty days of prohibition were over, had the cunning to hold a roof-tile over their heads. In this way the prohibition was not broken, because the house, magical and portable, went on protecting them wherever they were.
If a single tile held such power, the whole roof defended the whole house. And yet it too, like every loyal suit of armour, had a weak point: the flue of the chimney. Through it, without asking leave, came the lightning bolts, the "saette" like those of Jove. Against that scourge it was enough to own one of them, a thunderbolt, condensed and turned to stone, since it was known for certain that these condense and petrify on contact with the ground after they fall. They were small, very hard triangular stones, sharp and chipped: they were in fact those prehistoric arrowheads that now and then came back up out of the earth at ploughing time. Jove or no Jove, "saette" proved indeed to be the fitting name for them. With one of those inside the house you were safe: if you were the Master of the thunderbolt, how could it ever turn against you and strike you? And besides, is it not a sure thing that lightning never strikes twice in the same place? Fiery and unreflecting as it is, it would not even notice that you had found the remains of its earlier passage in the vineyard and carried them into the house by trickery!
In the face of this contiguity in space, this controlled promiscuity among things irreconcilable with one another or threatening, there was then an equally strong sense of continuity in time. Continuous was the hearth fire, which was never put out and never lit anew, but smouldered in the embers all night long and flared up again at dawn at the breath of whoever, surely a woman, had risen first.
Continuous the bread, which was leavened by adding to the new dough a soured little piece of the previous batch, of which a raw morsel was always kept back to leaven the bread to come. So much so that one could well say, from leaven to leaven, that one went back through the centuries and ate, at least in one invisible fragment, of the very same food as the distant ancestors.
A place of continuity was the dung-heap, where all the body's waste rotted down and became nourishment for the earth and for its fruits, and so returned to bodies. An unbroken cycle and the constant awareness of it: this was the countryside.
If, as we have seen, in relation to a space that forced close proximity one had to define, to set boundaries and separation, then in relation to this time of continuity and of eternal return upon itself one needed to mark it out with rites of passage, feasts, recurrences. It was at once a marking of time and a stitching together: to reaffirm continuity with the past also meant a guarantee and an expectation of the future. The cycle of the year, of the earth, of the harvest demanded, for the very survival of men, this faith in yesterday's ploughing, in today's sowing, in tomorrow's harvest.
Like the earth, like the animals whose life, death and anatomy were well known, the house too had the character of a living organism, equipped for survival.
It had a beating place at its centre, the kitchen, and all the other spaces gathered around it in ever wider concentric circles, yet always firmly bound to it. In the kitchen the hearth, the one with its ever-burning embers, was enormous and dominant. Within the hood, two side seats just the size of a body, il cantone, were a favoured spot for the old, who found in those niches warmth and drowsiness. The sciacquaio, with copper jugs at its sides and the basin in the middle, was always set against a small window, so that whoever had to clean the food with little water might at least have good sight and good light. Moreover, the little soapy water could always be thrown outside through that opening, so as not to mix it with the water that ran from the drain into a basin, reusable for mixing the pastone for the animals.
Above the kitchen were the lofts, fragrant and airy with their reed grids for hanging rosaries of sausages in winter and dried fruit, and for letting the vinsanto feel the heat and cold it needs to become properly sweet.
Higher up, in a squat and very ancient tower, sometimes older than the house itself, within the thick walls hollowed into honeycomb cells, pigeons were raised. It was an inexhaustible reserve of meat, to which little food and little care had to be given. It was the tower that, prolific and generous, provided the wherewithal to enrich the Sunday table or the plate of the new mother in need of good nourishment so as to make good milk and in turn to feed well.
At the sides of the kitchen the bedrooms crowded together, with the high beds with their sides of wrought iron and painted sheet-metal, the chest of drawers, the commodes, where the "convenience" consisted not so much in the top on which you could rest something, as in what they enclosed behind the low door, which spared you a cold trip out in the night for pressing needs.
Beneath all this stretched the stables, so that not even the breath of the oxen should go to waste but rise warm to the feet of the diners and the sleepers. The stable, be it understood, was above all that of the cattle: the pigs, also called "the black beasts", had a place of their own, separate from the house and downwind, for there is stable and stable, smell and smell.
Lower still, dug into the cool of the earth, was the cellar with its vats and presses and barrels, from which, as from a miraculous spring, the wine gushed and rose up to the table in little jugs of decorated ceramic, the vaselle.
Attached to the house on the outside, or separated only by that step of safety which prudence advises when one is dealing with fire, stood the oven. From the outside only a lean-to roof and a few little vents, at most the convenience of four nails for the tools and a shelf to lean things on, but inside a perfect machine: the fire-resistant material, the right curvature, the vent, the haunches that contain and insulate the baking chamber. It was the result of a complex wisdom placed at the service of the miracle of "daily bread". Looked at more closely, even from the outside the architecture of the oven appears worthy of greater attention and calls to mind something already seen elsewhere: it resembles a little sacred shrine set at some crossroads, to which for centuries people went to pay homage, the place inhabited by a presence at once familiar and bringing salvation.
This was the compact nucleus, its parts studied to form a perfect interlocking of one within another. A little further off widened the second circle: the hay-barn with walls of bricks laid to form an openwork lattice, and trunks barely stripped of their bark for beams and supports. The well, covered and perhaps in the shade of a fig tree.
The pigsty, downwind of course, divided into stalletti, each with an indoor shelter and its own little fenced yard, almost the parody in miniature of a rustic, animal charterhouse. The comodo, the one used during the day, screened by a hedge or a palisade, with a trickle of ever-running water and a little board of wood set astride on which to rest the feet, perhaps with the luxury of a bush of soft leaves with which to clean oneself after bodily needs. The tobacco drying-shed in certain cases, with its unmistakable bulk and its proliferation of chimney-pots. The threshing floor: a patch of earth so beaten and clean that no grass grows again on it, so that not a fallen grain of wheat sinks into it and not a pebble slips treacherously into the sacks. At the far end of the threshing floor, soft seasonal constructions of straw and hay grow, built to perfection, around the metulo, the central pole, straight and fixed, and dwindle throughout the year under the strokes of the scythe, only to rise again at the next threshing.

On still wider circles stood other structures for containing and exploiting the manifold forces of the land. Walking along roads and paths and meeting dry-stone walls, drainage ditches, sluices, charcoal pits, little boundary shrines… one came at last to the end of one holding and the beginning of another. The whole territory was harnessed in a dense net of paths, fences, ditches, rows of vines.. The houses, the churches, the mills were its nodes.
Not a hand's breadth of land remained outside this web that wrapped the world. Every centimetre of space was domesticated. A field that escaped this care, run wild, neglected by man, was a scandal and a shame.
And yet the whole countryside ran wild, rapidly, as had never been seen, at the end of the 1950s. The upheavals of the postwar years, the pull of the city, the new models, the new hopes, the fresh and uncomfortable memory of the old sufferings, everything pushed the young to leave the land.
It was then that the houses that had not been abandoned tried to adapt to town ways: the great kitchen broken up, the copper jugs and the seventeenth-century firedogs sold for nothing, there was a whole flowering of small dining rooms, kitchenettes, dining halls. Perhaps even today one of those poor-rococo parlours survives, with the plastic wrapping of the packaging never removed from the little armchairs so that they would not wear out, so it was said, but in truth because no one ever sat in them. In any case, one piece at a time, on the pretext of the "taverna", of a comfortable and "homely" space, of some lunch a little too crowded, the house began, starting from the kitchen, to reconstitute itself on the ground floor, in the former stables that had meanwhile been rebuilt further from the dwelling, if indeed they still existed. So on the upper floor there was preserved, dusted and polished up every Easter for the customary blessing, the monument to an alien model of life that had never taken root. On the ground floor something more functional and familiar was recreated, more like the house of always. But most of the houses had another fate. Often a fate of irreversible return to the earth, to the ivy, to the mould, to the heap of sand and stones from which they had been born. Some, better placed, better preserved, or perhaps only luckier, had the good fortune to be repopulated and now know a new life. Flexible as bodies know how to be flexible, they have adapted to new demands: large living rooms where there were stables, studies in the old kitchen, bedrooms where dried fruit was kept, beds for guests in the old pigsties, dining tables in the hay-barns.
This reborn house is probably astonished, looking at its belly full of swapped-around places and gleaming bathrooms it had never seen in its life and, an old child, it smiles as at new toys. And perhaps at times, maybe in some dawn a little too empty and silent, it misses the net of paths, well-kept ditches, rows of vines, footsteps of men and beasts that bound it to the neighbouring houses and extended its boundaries to the limits of a world.

Anna Belardinelli lives and works in Perugia, after three collections devoted to the painting of Pinturicchio, Signorelli and Caravaggio (Lo spettatore beffardo of 2008, Signorelli a occhi chiusi and Caravaggio a occhi chiusi of 2012, all published by the Casa Editrice Era Nuova, Perugia), in 2013 she published the volume Burri a occhi chiusi (Perugia, Era Nuova).