Hi there!
Currawong
;
jmh33
;
S
Student762
;
WILLIAM.M
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L
lambertiana
: Thanks to all for stopping by and kind words, glad you liked the post
!
mete
: the bread/pizza oven
is, in reality, a small chapel, called “santella”, it has an iron gate. This one has a small altar inside and a couple of frescos, but rather recent. It’s not uncommon here. Scattered throughout our territory, especially on the roads from the houses to the woods and meadows, santelle give evidence of the religiousness of the people who used to live these villages. Besides being precious samples of folk art, these places of worship tell something about the culture and traditions of our ancestors. The Saints of these chapels were asked for protection, help and solace in difficult and distressful times of life, specially in these rugged lands and in ancient times. They also were the “paths of the soul” in everyday life, because prayer and the sacred were not confined to churches but extended to civil life. One would never pass by Our Lady of the Rosary santella without murmuring a short prayer and the small chapel is almost always adorned with spontaneous flowers still nowadays
.
More interesting, from an historical point of view, is the other small building, looking like a tower. This is very typical in the Bergamo valleys, it’s called “Roccolo”. The construction of these structures dates back to Medieval period, where hunting of big games was only permitted for nobles/aristocrats.
Woodsmen and peasants could not go hunting except with very rare exceptional permits, allowed by their "owners". But the hunger, that was a lot
, pushed many to devote themselves to hunting small game (neglected by the landowners). So peasants and woodsmen, who lived their lives in close contact with Nature and therefore knowing rhythms and frequentations (birds in the first place) began to build traps to capture them.
From the laces, to the nets, they moved briefly to the construction of the “Roccoli”, which were nothing but rustic and spontaneous architecture that mountains and conformation of the territory allowed and favoured. They consist mainly of a turret-shaped building, surrounded by trees, shrubs or climbing grasses to hide its visibility, around rows of trees in a circular row that intersected each other, to whose branches they were hanging up cages with call birds.
These “Roccoli” were built where the birds used to stop or pass. These buildings result harmoniously inserted in the landscape and underwent continuous transformations to make them more and more functional in order to capture the birds, since this meant eating and surviving for many families. Today they're not in use anymore, this type of hunting is forbidden by legislation but still work as bird refugees/shelters and some has been transformed into house dependences
.
Ciao!
