Rural modernity in post-war Southern Italy: the La Martella village in Matera

Abstract

By the 1930s, the city of Matera in southern Italy and particularly its most ancient districts, the Sassi, were widely depicted as a ‘national shame’ because of the poor living conditions of their inhabitants. After the Second World War, the joint interventions of the Italian-American organisation UNRRA-Casas and the regional Land Reform Authority elaborated a project for partial evacuation of the Sassi and resettlement of the population in a newly-built rural village named La Martella. This article focusses on the relationships between the surge of anthropological and sociological interest in southern Italian society’s exoticism and the La Martella design process, as well as on how the political aims of the project’s promoters affected the choices made by the team of designers. The peculiar reinterpretation that La Martella designers offered of the neighbourhood unit principle—seen as a means to give substantial continuity to traditional forms of communitarian life while also fostering social, economic and physical modernisation—is interpreted as symbolic of the Italian post-war ideal of rural modernity.