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Earthquakes sometimes determine and continue to feed the phenomenon of abandonment with the irreversible destructive effects on territories and communities. An effect which a large area of Calabria suffered, devastated by an earthquake in 1783. This essay, through the reading of archival documentation produced by the “Cassa Sacra”, an institution appointed by the Bourbon government for reconstruction, investigates a theme which is often left in darkness. The reading of these documents tried to capture the feelings and doubts that animated the communities in the aftermath of the earthquake, between the lines of official documentation. In some cases, these communities were resigned to abandoning their destroyed villages, in others, however, they were induced to move to new built-up areas. The exoduses were not always spontaneous, and were sometimes strenuously opposed, while others chose to stay. There were also cases in which the convinced intention to “emigrate” elsewhere was, instead, prevented, in order to protect certain interests that were not entirely coherent with official guidelines, which, in promoting relocation, always prefigured a better life elsewhere for the affected populations. Tra abbandono e ricostruzione: note dai carteggi degli ufficiali impegnati in Calabria dopo il terremoto del 1783 Il terremoto, con gli effetti distruttivi a volte irreversibili provocati su territori e comunità, ha determinato e ancora alimenta il fenomeno dell'abbandono. Un esito di cui subì le conseguenze una vasta area della Calabria devastata dal sisma nel 1783. In quest'occasione, attraverso la lettura della documentazione d'archivio prodotta dalla Cassa Sacra, ente preposto dal governo borbonico alla ricostruzione, si inizia ad indagare un tema rimasto spesso nell'ombra. Si cerca di cogliere tra le righe della documentazione ufficiale, i sentimenti e i dubbi che animavano le comunità all'indomani del sisma, in alcuni casi rassegnate ad abbandonare i propri paesi distrutti, in altri, invece, indotte a spostarsi in nuovi abitati da costruire, con esodi non sempre spontanei, avverso i quali, in alcuni casi, ci si oppose strenuamente scegliendo di rimanere. Non mancarono anche i casi in cui la convinta intenzione a "emigrare" altrove, venne invece impedita a tutela di interessi non del tutto coerenti con quei principi ufficiali che nell'orientare la ricostruzione, dovevano prefigurare una vita migliore per le popolazioni colpite.

The Sila law (12/05/1950), first act of that land innovation so much invoked in the years after the Second World War to respond to the backwardness of the agrarian system, officially initiated Agricultural Reform in Calabria. The Institution of the “Opera for the Valorizzazione on the Sila (OVS) built the settlement system in the Silano-Jonico District, at the same time as infrastructure works and the assignment of farms: small rural towns and farmhouses. The focus of attention is on the Marquisate of Crotone. A territory that had always been the protagonist of numerous land-owning phenomena, which even during the fifties became the epicentre of the reform programme; transforming the landscape from solitary and desert to a mosaic of architectural buildings and drawn rural patterns. The same landscape – fragile, complicated and fascinating – narrated by Giuseppe Isnardi, Lucio Gambi and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Among the “dune” of the Marquisate rises the village of San Leonardo di Cutro, designed by Giovanni Astengo, between 1952 and 1955, on the pre-existence of a small nucleus built by the Jesuits at the end of the 16th century. Its planimetric design is the result of an historical and anthropic stratification that, from the years of its foundation to today, covers the function of social connector, first as a reference place for the farmers scattered in the farms, and today as a small town. La Riforma Agraria degli anni Cinquanta in Calabria. Conoscenza, conservazione e trasformazione del paesaggio del Marchesato di Crotone La legge Sila (12/05/1950), primo atto di quell’innovazione fondiaria tanto invocata negli anni del secondo dopoguerra per rispondere alla condizione di arretratezza del sistema agrario, avviava ufficialmente la Riforma Agraria in Calabria. L’Ente dell’Opera per la Valorizzazione della Sila (OVS) realizzava nel comprensorio Silano-Jonico, contemporaneamente alle opere infrastrutturali e all’assegnazione dei poderi, il sistema insediativo: borghi rurali e case coloniche. In questa occasione si focalizza l’attenzione sul Marchesato di Crotone. Un territorio, da sempre protagonista di numerosi fenomeni latifondistici che, anche durante gli anni Cinquanta diventava l’epicentro del programma della riforma, trasformando il paesaggio da solitario e deserto in un mosaico di architetture edificate e di pattern rurali disegnati. Lo stesso paesaggio – fragile, complicato e affascinante – narrato da Giuseppe Isnardi, Lucio Gambi e Pier Paolo Pasolini. Tra le “dune” del Marchesato sorge il borgo di San Leonardo di Cutro, progettato da Giovanni Astengo, tra il 1952 e il 1955, sulla preesistenza di un piccolo nucleo costruito dai padri Gesuiti alla fine del Cinquecento. Il suo impianto planimetrico è frutto di una stratificazione storica e antropica che, dagli anni della sua fondazione a oggi, ricopre la funzione di connettore sociale, prima come luogo di riferimento per i contadini sparsi nei poderi, adesso come piccolo centro urbano.

This essay aims to provide an interpretation of the slow shift from “Grand Tour” to modern tourism by considering the case of some journeys around Calabria. For this purpose, three exemplary cases were selected and analysed. First, the one of Cesare Malpica that travelled in Calabria in the 1840s, sitting in a litter, by coach and even on mule-back. Secondly, the journey of Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, who travelled across Calabria by bicycle towards the end of the 19th century. Thirdly, Bernard Berenson‘s journeys, who visited Calabria by car twice. First time in 1908 and, after almost an half century, the second time in 1955.

Since the eighteenth century, southern Italy has been the destination of European travelers who explored its foothills until they reached Sicily, documenting with drawings and diaries, places full of myths and legends, which still preserve the fascination of the stories of ancient writers. Painters, watercolourists and talented writers, the English brothers Edward and Robert-Henry Cheney, after spending a few years in Rome, undertake on a journey in southern Italy between 1823 and 1825, from Campania to Sicily. In this journey the Cheney also crossed Calabria – a mysterious and still wild land – from Campotenese to Reggio, representing the beautiful landscapes. The views produced by Edward, on which the essay dwells, depict the mountains of Pollino and those of Sila, the plain of Sibari, the Tyrrhenian coast of the Dei and that of Viola, changing landscapes where the architecture is flanked and blends with an unspoiled and lush nature. From the watercolours, pencil and ink drawings, made by the two brothers during the trip, it emerges clearly that it was the reality of the places visited that became the key to rediscover the naturalistic representation of the landscape.

Looking at the degraded natural landscape, as it appears today crossing the South of Italy, and especially Calabria, it appears to pass through a palimpsest of traces that can only let us guess what artists of the expedition Saint-Non saw about two hundred and forty years ago. The chaotic urban system, fragmented cultivated land, infrastructure and minimum services are attributable to a single factor: the impact between an arduous natural environment and an economic-social structure that has hindered, or even prevented, a rational use of resources. However, beyond this recent stratification, the oldest forms of human settlements are still recognizable, clearly discernible in the views of the Voyage Pittoresque and the description of Dominique Vivant Denon, partly attenuated in the rewriting of Saint-Non. This contribution presents as an integrative visual kaleidoscope, a collage of images, both, fragmentary and variegated.

The first concrete initiative aimed to remove Calabria from its secular isolation was the construction of the railway along the Ionian side, beginning in 1866, followed by the Tyrrhenian side twenty years later, during which connections with the North of Italy was however guaranteed, not by the post road, but rather by the coastal routes through Reggio, Scilla, Pizzo and Scalea, also preferred by travellers of past centuries. The Calabrian coast, in this way, was marked by the railway line, with radical consequences on the perception of the landscape: both costal railway lines became a formidable instrument of observation of uncontaminated nature for the Calabrian people themselves: a crown of hill town centres overlooking rocky ridges and empty beaches. In the following decades, some internal connecting railway lines were built. Today, few stretches offer the only surviving possibility of enjoying the original sense of the journey on the railway tracks of Calabria, unlike the widespread degradation which affects the coastal lines, resulting from uncontrolled urbanization phenomena occurred from the 1950s.

The result of a revision process on the part of the publisher of Voyage Picturesque, regarding the original drawings and texts produced by participants of the expedition, is a collection of views of cities, landscapes and architecture of Calabria, which were prepared during the expedition organized in 1778 by the Abbot of Saint-Non and led by Dominique Vivant- Denon. A comparison of the Voyage with the original travel diary of Vivant-Denon, published in another edition, and with a series of sketches and preparatory drawings by Louis-Jean Desprez and Claude-Louis Châtelet, offers the opportunity to verify how those unexplored and largely unknown places were perceived and then interpreted, through the filter of the "brave" travelers who crossed Calabria at the end of the 18th century and, eventually, to also verify how those same places are still recognizable in their original structures.

In the literature and iconography of journeys to Calabria between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is difficult to find a more successful work than Edward Lear's Journal of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria regarding the level of integration between textual narration and visual narration. The recent discovery of some drawings and paintings concerning Reggio, Staiti and Bagnara offers the opportunity to compare the extraordinary connection between the two narrative forms in different landscape contexts but united by the same poetic attraction on the part of English travellers.

The ideal image of Calabria that the Saint-Non expedition hoped to find was that handed down by the classics, with archaeological remains capable of reconnecting myth to reality. On arriving in the various locations, however, these expectations found a very different situation, and the drawings had no choice but to adapt to it. Yet, unexpectedly, it was precisely from the loss of the ancient image that the new one emerged. This was composed of wild lands and inhabited centers, picturesquely perched on the cliffs or on the inland rocks. It was this new Calabria that was presented to Europe, through an original iconography, which owed nothing to the designers of the past. A part of the image codified in the Voyage was maintained until relatively recently: urban transformations did not - or only partially - affect historic centers, thus maintaining their recognizability. On the contrary, another more substantial part was abruptly annulled by natural events, such as the earthquake of 1783, and more often by interventions wanted and imposed by man, with irreversible alterations of cities and territories.

Examination of the view from the Saint-non expedition named «View of the rocks and Bova seashore nearby Capo Spartivento with Mt. Etna in the background» and its current photographic context, which represents a diachronic comparison among iconographical sources of different periods, is implemented with the aim to understand the evolutionary nature of this specific territorial context but, more in general, to make us to deal with landscape as a complicated notion. Landscape is an ambiguous word as a definition as well as a function. Therefore, another aim emerges, no less important; to offer a framework of incisive considerations relevant to a more general structural transformation concerning the essence of landscape and its related culture which, since its appearance in the 16th century, drives it to its formal conceptualisation in the 19th century, and from that moment to its current structure. The examined process of metamorphosis sees the transformation of landscape from a cornerstone element of an aesthetic – literary visio, (therefore only contemplative), to a scientific-functional one oriented to inspect and manage reality.

A particular interpretative key of the characteristics of Calabria in the eyes of travellers of the past revolves around the expression «we suffer and enjoy», reported by the Abbot Giovanni Battista Pacichelli in his famous volume Il regno di Napoli in prospettiva, published in Naples in 1703 after a methodical expedition completed about ten years earlier. From a story by Leandro Alberti, Bologna, 1525, in the tales of ancient "tourists", the suffered hardships due to difficult internal road connections - which forced travellers to favour sea travel - were offset by the enjoyment of the exceptional nature of the landscapes, which often included villages. It was only from the travel chronicles of Henry Swinburne, who arrived in Calabria in 1777, that the parameters of judgment on the one hand opened to include the features of popular folklore, while on the other, they focused more on the illuminist origins of the feudal system and the monopolies (of the King and feudal Lords). Tourists interpreted the "different" behaviour of the inhabitants of the region, not as a sign of uncultured, but of a different culture.¬ However, in the Voyage Pittoresque, the texts written by the abbot of Saint-Non, based on the diary of Dominique Vivant Denon - head of his expedition who twice travelled to Calabria, in the spring and autumn of 1778 - reflect the essence of the landscape of the region as the result of a miraculous balance between nature and the work of man.