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Brisighella

(Emilia Romagna - Italy)

Country Farmhauses

C O U N T R Y F A R M H A U S E S

As every place has characteristics of its own, I think a complete description of what a typical Romagna farmhouse looks like could be interesting. Since every inhabited place symbolizes the local traditions, here is how tradition has influenced the building of each single house either on the plain or on the hills. So rural architecture is fully expressed in traditional farmhouses, which can be seen through the life of the plants that surround them.

The one on the plain is arranged with the living area and service areas (cellar, cowshed, shelter for farm equipment and barns) side by side on the ground level. The typical hill house is made of sandstone and has the service areas on the ground floor, the living area is above it. In the mountain areas the houses are built on slopes.

The traditional hill-farmhouses consisted of a big kitchen, bedrooms, the attic, the cowshed and the cellar. The number of rooms, their size and therefore the overall dimensions of the house were proportionate to the production of the land. All around the house there was and there is still a farm yard where farm-yard animals are very numerous: cocks, hens, chickens, ducks, geese and ganders, pigeons, guinea fowls and turkeys.

This was due to a centuries-old economics and social system in Romagna which was based on sharecropping, that is on splitting the produce in half between the owner of the estate and the farmer. Therefore the number of hands and mouths of the farmer’s family had to be proportionate to the productive potential of the estate, with sufficient hands to do all the work necessary and not too many mouths to feed.

Besides a home and work tools, the rural house characteristics to Romagna made up the microcosm in which the circle of life revolved, from birth to death, in a continuing series of words and, more importantly, gestures of great symbolic intensity.

The centre of the family life was, and in my case is still, the fire place. As a matter of fact in one of the pictures you can see sausages on a grill going to be cooked for dinner.

I hope you have enjoyed the description of the milieu where I live. And where my forefathers used to lead their simple lives.

Last but not least, a wine cellar was dug below the kitchen and the ground floor to keep wine cool. Wine was kept in casks and now in bottles. A typical cask was called by their old name of Big Casks. They were hand made and carried on carts drawn by oxen. They belonged to the daily life of my family and of all country families in general: I consider them memories of the past and I am glad when I can still see them during country festivals. The floor of a cellar was just earth, the walls were made of bricks and mud; the structure of the ceiling consisted of arches. A little window made the light pass through it, but it was a light light not to spoil the conservation of the wine itself. Of course, my country house, the house where I live I mean, was structured like this. During the Second World War my grandparents and my relatives took shelter there from bombing.

Piadina Romagnola

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