Full of Water, Full of life: Water, Sustainability and Built Heritage in the 19th to 21st centuries San Pasquale Valley, Calabria, Italy

Summary

In the early 1800s wealthy landowners were granted or purchased lands in the San Pasquale Valley, located 50 km from the provincial capital of Reggio Calabria in southern Calabria, Italy. Internal migration of farmworkers to establish commercial bergamot, olive, grape, and mulberry orchards in this valley created a large and thriving community of farmworker families in the valley who built the landowners’ villas, the overseers’ and farmworkers’ houses, and the farming infrastructure of wells, cisterns, aqueducts, mills, canals, roads, sheds, barns, and animal stalls. Today, crumbling infrastructure, lack of governmental investment, and dwindling population in San Pasquale Valley mark a steep decline in the sustainability of the community, especially in the last 50 years. Our research tracks the birth, fluorescence and decline of community life in the last two centuries to investigate how people establish, nurture and fight the decline of community through decades of political, social and economic crises.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Localized Rural Histories and Connected Worlds: Interdisciplinary Narratives of Transformation, Emigration and Interaction

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 997