From the Thirties to post-war reconstruction. The Land Reclamation Consortia and rural architecture in Italy

This investigation highlights a new conception of design space in architecture, in the relationship between settlement and land, rooted in architectural historical studies and research on rural and agrarian economy and unlocks a potential regeneration and restoration of the rural villages of Italy’s cultural heritage. In Italy, the theme of rural architecture has gained momentum ever since the spread of the Modern Movement, reviving settlement and spatial principles as a moral lesson for the general development of new aesthetics and a new society. Innovative concepts inspired by Arrigo Serpieri such as “Integral Land Reclamation”, and long-standing institutions such as the Land Reclamation Consortia, became official law in 1933, and played a crucial role in this process, particularly in consolidating new architectural thinking that was to endure up to post-war reconstruction and beyond, until our own times. Paradoxically, ideologically opposing phenomena, settlements related to the extensive land reclamation of the Fascist period and the rural redevelopment of the Fifties, were somehow based on comparable theoretical and operational aspects. We can recognize these ideas by looking at the most interesting experiments developed in these two periods: the city of Sabaudia designed by Piccinato, and the village of La Martella at Matera designed by Quaroni (and sponsored by Adriano Olivetti). The quest for a new “moral aesthetic” of architecture undertaken by leading representatives of Italian Rationalism was to re- emerge in the neorealism of post-war reconstruction.