Stone Landscape (Dry stone walls)
Territory: Iblei
Approved on 25/01/2006
Card insertion: Heritage Sicily
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Technical sheet prepared by: Region of Sicily - Department of cultural heritage and Sicilian identity - CRicd: Regional center for inventory, cataloging and documentation and Sicilian regional film library
Macerate (disordered accumulations); Reinforced walls o bought, manniri, cuccumeddi (two-sided walls, herds, lunettes - accumulations with linear development); brick (walls, terraces, towers - structured accumulations)
The dry stone construction technique has its roots in prehistoric times: the first records of stone terracing in the Middle East date back to about 8000 years ago.
With the Greek colonization - between the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries BC - the technique of building dry stone walls, used to delimit and protect small agricultural plots, spreads in the Mediterranean basin. In south-eastern Sicily, one of the oldest testimonies of this technique is given by the fortification of Monte Finocchito, in the territory of Noto (SR). News of the presence of dry stone walls in Sicily can be found in De re rustica by Varrone.
It is probable that artifacts built with this technique delimited the citrus groves, under Arab domination, and the first walls used to reduce hill slopes, defend the soil from washout and facilitate the cultivation of the land, date back to the XNUMXth - XNUMXth centuries.
During the Spanish domination, Pietro IV D'Aragona, having acquired control of Sicily, imposed here the rules already enacted in Catalonia between 1345 and 1373, which provided for a height of the walls limited to one meter and 20 centimeters (seis palmos) and forbade its construction where these prevented access to the sea.
The introduction of the emphyteusis in the 600th century, implying the obligation to enclose the assigned lands, causes a vast campaign of stone removal in the countryside and the construction of dry stone walls that will have a heavy influence on the Sicilian landscape.
A further impulse to the recovery of uncultivated land, with the elevation of artifacts made of dry stone, occurs during the Fascist period and, subsequently, as a consequence of the Agrarian Reform, launched by the De Gasperi government in 1950.
Today, dry stone architecture, which is often in critical conditions resulting from land abandonment, illegal grazing, fires, disinterest of local administrations, is protected under the Urban Code, and there are many initiatives aimed at its recovery.
Laborers, farmers, murassiccari (specialized craftsmen)
Commonly, we speak of "dry masonry" with reference to the assembly, in places that do not coincide with the extraction site, of stone materials taken from a quarry, without the use of mortar. In the case of the asset in question, the assembly and construction take place with stone materials found and collected on the spot, also with the aim of freeing the land to be cultivated.
In addition to the unordered accumulations, the artifacts made include walls, fences, lunettes, towers and terraces, shelters, huts, houses and neviere, stairs.
The rooms used as shelters have mostly clay floors and can contain niches and feeders. They are usually circular in plan, more rarely square, and surmounted by architraves, arches and domes or ogival, conical, decadent or stepped roofs.
For the selection and preparation of stone materials and for the construction of the artifacts, tools such as clubs, picks are used (face), pointed picks, wedges (cousins), wedges (years), hammers (liffiaturi, martieddi each) lines, templates etc. (Tiralongo, 2007)
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