Balestrino: the ancient charm of a ghost village.

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ORIGINAL POST: BALESTRINO, IL FASCINO ANTICO DI UN BORGO FANTASMA.

Balestrino has its own particular appeal, that of a medieval village being slowly taken back by nature after being abandoned by man… 

Where today stands the imposing Del Carretto castle, in Byzantine age was probably built a fortified position, around which then rose the Burgus Plebis of Balestrino, from which the “Borgo” district, now abandoned, developed. The other districts of Bergalla, Cuneo and Poggio formed in early Middle Ages as the first real residential settlement, improving their agricultural activities and moving their olive, legume and cereal farming up on the mountainsides thanks to the use of terrace cultivation, typical of the Liguria region. In feudal times the Bava, a noble family from Piemonte, became the first lords of the Balestrino feud, and built the first castle. The feud then was passed to the Del Carretto marquises who, around mid-XVI century, built their castle on the rock overlooking the village. Between 1515 and 1559 king Pirro II issued a number of edicts that burdened families with heavy taxes and work provisions; but the village notables, used to having an almost complete freedom, didn’t accept these edicts and prepared a conspiracy…

In 1561 Pirro II was killed and his castle burned down. The feud remained in the hands of the Del Carretto, who in order to prevent more riots established a court with torture chambers. Despite this, Balestrino knew an age of great expansion, becoming a sort of economic capital for the entire valley. After Napoleon Bonaparte’s occupation, in XVIII century, however, it became the scene of dramatic events: the people defended strenuously their territory, through battles and retaliations, but with poor results and the deaths of many villagers. After becoming part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Balestrino was annexed to Piemonte, and then, when the Kingdom of Italy was formed in 1860, definitively to Liguria.

The Del Carretto castle still dominates the beautiful sea-facing valley, in memory of the time when it was surrounded by a lively village with a solid mill, furnace and soap-based economy. Today Balestrino is a lifeless town, where the signs of time can be read in the cracks in the walls and in the weeds slowly eating its foundations. A time no longer told by the sundial and the church’s clock is faceless. 

The episode that forced the townspeople to abandon their homes and move to the surroundings, in what is today Balestrino’s population centre, took place in 1953, when the town had been declared impracticable: a serious geological instability posed a threat to the village and its inhabitants…

The abandoned part of Balestrino is about 1,5 hectares wide, with over 44000 square metres of recoverable structures. A good part of the buildings suffers from a solidity-compromising decay, but is today at the centre of a study and recovery project aiming at the complete reconstruction of the medieval urban space. This project could restore Balestrino to its former medieval charm, but would surely deprive it of the peculiarity that sets it apart from other ancient towns: its crumbling and mysterious condition of abandon, as if immortalized in a snapshot taken decades ago.

The various legends, mysteries and popular beliefs passed down during the centuries and told around the fireplace have always influenced the town’s story, and now duel its ghostly charm at night and echo among sinister noises and shadows…

Balestrino’s charm spread well beyond national borders, ranking among the twenty most famous and eerie ghost towns in the world. For this reason it was chosen as location for the movie “Inkheart”, a fantasy story set in the real world in which the village is brought back to live after years of abandon. In fact, it was turned into Capricorn Village and partially rebuilt through special effects letting us witness the village how it probably once was, with people walking the streets, merchants, guards, everyday life’s activities…

Walking through the narrow alleys sends shivers to the mind, which wanders back in time with imagination, trying to visualise people standing behind the black, empty windows, without finding anything but the lonely remains of that life. Balestrino is a ghost town which preserves not only the memory of its people’s presence, but also a trace of man’s passage…

Link to ORIGINAL POST.

(Translation by Marco Salvadori)

A disappearing past, a forgetting present, a fading future...

ORIGINAL POST: UN PASSATO CHE SCOMPARE, UN PRESENTE CHE DIMENTICA E UN FUTURO CHE CANCELLA

 

Let’s try to picture a house, our house. Our shelter, the place where we rest, where every day we find ourselves in. We may travel all around the world, but home is always our fixed point, our main destination. Now let’s imagine losing it, having to abandon it forever…let’s picture a village, or a city, let’s picture every single place we hang around every single day. Let’s picture a memory of our childhoods. And now, let’s picture a cemetery of houses, of broken memories and ruins of interrupted lives…this was the sad destiny of many towns, and will be the inescapable destiny of many others. 

Large is the number of ghost towns in Italy and the world, larger than what one would imagine. Some to resist time and destruction for now, others are gone forever, erased from memory and maps alike. Many can be the causes for this most times traumatic and painful abandon. Earthquakes, floods, fires, landslides, natural phenomena in front of which we remain defenceless. Many towns were forgotten and left alone even before dying. Maybe after being exploited for as long as they could produce wealth. And then they empty slowly, and slowly they become skeletons of the past. Because man needs a home to feel safe, but the home too needs man to keep standing… The present of many houses, today, is this… 

 

Romagnano Al Monte, abandoned after the Irpinia Earthquake, Italy.

 

But the future could be even worse…

 

The future of Timbuktu

 

A city like Detroit has lost more than 700.000 residents in the last 30 years. Half a century ago it numbered almost 2 million inhabitants, today it’s down to 900.000 and the number keeps dropping. But Banjul, capital city of Gambia, faces the risk of complete sinking due to erosion and the rising of the sea level. Mexico City, too, is sinking, because of the aquifer that constitutes the city’s primary drinking water source. Each time one of its residents drinks a glass of water, the city subsides a little. In the last 100 years, it has sunk as much as 9 metres. Naples could potentially be destroyed by a Vesuvio eruption, as could San Francisco by the infamous “Big One”.

 

How Detroit looks like today

 

Past can’t be changed, but it’s in the present that we can do something to keep whole cities from disappearing or being forgotten. In Italy, a recent report by Legambiente and Serico-Gruppo Cresme has forseen that in 2016 4.395 will be the towns that, if no interventions are made, will suffer a progressive housing problems: 42,2% of Italian towns, 10,4% of the population. Among these, 1.650 are destined to become actual ghost towns, which means a fifth of all Italian municipalities, the 4,2% of the population. To the already numerous ghost towns will thus add more, in a spiralling motion of relentless abandon. 

For many, ghost towns are places with a mysterious charm, remote corners to experience the absence of man where there once was a heavy presence. Apocalyptic landscapes of a destroyed past, where a camera can capture a decaying but still attractive and seductive remain of someone else’s lives. But it’s not so for everyone…for those who lived there, it’s not a ghost town, it’s home disappearing into oblivion. In our journey through these villages, we met many people who sadly told us “We’ve been forgotten”. This is the truth. We have forgotten that in Italy there still are authentic and wonderful places, where old cultures and traditions still survive, where people live simply and with fond attachment to their roots. We’ve seen these villages emptied, now inhabited only by the elderly because the young have gone away. Those very elderly who already had to abandon their homes and now see their hometown disappear. Ghost towns can be enhanced by telling their story, as long as we don’t stay indifferent. They existed and still try to survive, but if nothing is done they will die with the last who lived there. We must help them be remembered, and most importantly avoid them falling apart forever. And if for many of them it’s already too late, for many others there’s still much that can be done to contrast their abandon and prevent a piece of Italy from being forgotten. For a place with no memory has no future, but future is what we create in the present…

(Translation by Marco Salvadori)

Link to ORIGINAL POST.