Architecture of the Italian Province – Towns on the hills
Architecture is not only about palaces and churches - it's worth taking a look, how local architecture developed, where and what was the spatial arrangement of small towns and agricultural estates, which have at least as great an impact on the Italian landscape as the more famous architectural monuments.
Throughout the middle ages, the province of Italy was dangerous and unhealthy, and the land consisted largely of wastelands, wetlands or barren areas. Even in the 15th century, wolves prevailed a few miles from Florence, in forests inhabited mainly by robbers and deer. Rural topography, with an abundance of hills and mountains rising among the fertile plains, it provided an excellent location for fortified housing estates, where the population could at the same time escape from the swamps and take refuge from robbers, and in limited areas to cultivate the soil.
In the period of its greatest expansion - from the 12th to the 14th centuries - the cities on the hills rose like mushrooms after rain. Many of them were founded on the ruins of the early Etruscan cities - Chiusi and Cortona - or near former cave settlements, as in Sorano. Matera. Basilicata. it grew around caves inhabited in the distant past, formed as a result of natural erosion of volcanic rock (tuff) along the edge of a high ravine. Homesteads, which arose from these caves (called I Sassi. meaning literally "rocks”) were inhabited to 1952 year. when they were ordered to be demolished. Though most of the cities on the hills were lapped by tall ones, often battered walls. often the defensive values of the location itself were sufficient. For example, houses in Pitigliano (Tuscany) they give the impression of a natural extension of erratic rocks. on top of which they are seated. Steep rocky overhangs allowed the inhabitants to repel their attackers with boulders thrown from above, sometimes from the extra height of the towers. The same hurried (but practical) the way the corpses of the dead were disposed of. as well as waste. After the revolution in the field of defense construction, which took place in the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century and the invention of gunpowder and cannons, high rocks or walls have become less necessary, and the towers shrunk and adapted to new methods of fighting.