"Yet in that old [work] there was some vitality, some mysterious and suggestive trace of what it had been [... ];
some sweetness in those soft lines shaped by wind and rain ".
J. Ruskin, The seven lamps of architecture
On a clearing of just over one hectare, at the top of a hill with slopes that descend sharply towards the Salandrella valley and the Lavannara canal, the surviving sections of the ruined city wall stand out among the brushwood, in a state of precarious balance and the remains of the square tower which until thirty years ago was framed by an Angevin arch. Today the atmosphere of abandonment, underlined by bushes and thistles that dot the clays of the badlands, takes on an emblematic meaning here. The castle of Uggiano is just one of the many ruins among which we are used to wander in a region of ancient population, where the ruins of Greek and Roman antiquity juxtapose with prehistoric sites and medieval works of fortification justifying the strategic role of Basilicata, give way to the settlements of the following centuries.
The castrum of Agromonte, in Vulture, disappears with its hamlet in the thirteenth century; always at the foot of the Vulture the Castrum of Armaterra was destroyed during the repression of the Ghibelline revolt of 1268; if from Vulture's reliefs we move to the Sinni Valley, we discover that the castle of Amignano once stood overthere. In Aragonese age the castrum of Brundisium de Montana disappeared and, not far, between Pietrapertosa and Laurenzana, the ancient fortified center of Castrum Belloctum, or on the other side of the Basento, in the Tricarico area, once stood the Castrum Kervanos. Still in the Aragonese period, Irsum, Montepeloso's fief, disappeared. In the thirteenth century on the bank of the Ofanto overlooking Melfi there was a castle called Camarda.
It is certain that where the castrum is made up of a built-up area, the population has certainly disappeared or moved; it is not necessarily so where the castle is placed to defend a farmhouse and can even disappear leaving behind the inhabited area or part of it, as happened to the stronghold of Montescaglioso which in 1033 repels the Byzantine attack whose fortress and the gallery remains emerge on the cliff. The same can be said for Uggiano: the abandonment of the castle in all probability, contrary to what has been handed down to us, will not result in the disappearance of the inhabited center that it served. With the victory in Benevento in 1266 by Carlo d'Angiò on the last Swabian, Manfredi, a strong repression is unleashed involving the whole region and led to the destruction and disappearance of many fortified centers, such as the fortified stronghold of Ruvo del Monte and the Saracen colony of Tursi; however, there are also inhabited centers that rise, such as Irsina.
The fact that few visible traces of those castles and farmhouses remain does not diminish their historical importance, but here a non-marginal difficulty arises: what is the castrum of which the documents speak? In classical Latin the term, together with castellum, indicates a fortified village; in late latinity the castrum or castellum also indicates a fortress in which a military garrison is located, which defends a town, controls transit routes, it is the last shelter of a retreating gentleman. The literary Latin, together with these meanings, will also acquire that of a fortified village. Therefore castrum indicates both an exclusively military fortified settlement, and a fortified enclosure in which the surrounding population habitually deposits their crops and take refuge in times of danger, and finally the fortified residence of a person who exercises his authority in the area.
Some sources report that on 15 and 30 December 1456 two strong earthquake shocks destroyed Uggiano, Brindisi di Montagna and damaged many centers of Vulture. Abandonment appears common to many villages in the region, although it only explicitly emerges from a relatively small number of documents, but we will not address and analyze the not many documents here, in which the abandonment of castles and farmhouses is attested univocally, and the authoritative studies that have been dedicated to the theme of early decastellation in Basilicata. But after the recent authoritative and documented publications of Father Carlo Palestina, it is doubtful that Uggiano was destroyed by the earthquake. A population of more than two thousand inhabitants (404 fires in 1277) cannot be housed in the castrum or on the inhospitable slopes of the hill, but, at least in part, on the area of the Greek and Roman Ferrandina. With this, the centennial story of the destruction of Uggiano due to the strong earthquake, of the transfer of the population (fecimo mettere quelli cittadini in altro loco due miglia da longe e più... we had the citizens of the city to be placed two miles longer and more ...), of the foundation of Ferrandina and of that of Federico of Aragon who in 1494 builds the city from its foundations ... and calls it Ferrandina. A precious document quoted from Palestine reports that “Uggiano had a very strong fortress. The aforementioned king Federico ..., under the pretext of the earthquake, like the one to avoid the evils he feared, thought that the said fortress was demolished ... . And how many other fortresses and fortified places in Lucania suffer the same fate? Furthermore, if the scarce strength of materials used in the construction of castles is admitted, it is clear that even the lack of constant maintenance may be sufficient to deteriorate the defensive efficiency, even without the intervention of an earthquake or a destructive will.
The abandonment of Uggiano following an earthquake to build Ferrandina is a circumstance to be considered scarcely probable; just as even a war or a direct destructive will itself are never sufficient to provoke the definitive disappearance of any human settlement. Uggiano, located on the hill in front of Ferrandina, testifies for its position the strategic importance of the place. A first sure chronological reference is 845, when the territory of Oblano (this is the denomination that most recurs in the documents) becomes part of the Principality of Salerno: the presence of a castle built on this hill, in a strategic point hinged between two valleys, it is certainly aimed at affirming military and administrative supremacy with its military presence on the side of Craco and Salandrella. According to some sources, it was certainly built before the 11th century: in 1068 Robert the Guiscard attacked the stronghold of the Byzantine Empire (cum paucis abiit Obbianum ..), having failed to take Irsina. In the Catalog of the Barons, while mentioning the economic and demographic conditions of Norman Basilicata, a Rogerius of Ogiano is mentioned. Further references to the site are found only in 1269 and 1275, when Uggiano passes to Pietro de Beaumont and Giovanni di Monteforte. In the Norman period, the fortified place, whose rooms are reserved (in harmony with Fasoli's hypotheses) only to the lord, castellanus, his retinue and the defensive system, is subjected to strengthening and completion. The structure consists of a fence with the shape of an irregular polygon with internal diameters of 140 m and 60 m respectively, which follows the course of the ridgel, defended by a series of square-plan towers.
As in the rest of the territory of Ferrandina and in the neighboring municipalities of Craco and Pisticci, the substantial archaeological finds testify to the Greek and Roman presence, an hoped-for excavation campaign in the Uggiano area could highlight evidence of the Hellenistic period, or a settlement before the year 1000 and, only subsequently consolidated, in the Longobard age, with the construction of a castrum with walls. From studies on the materials used in the construction and on the equipment of the current plant, a pre-Norman and almost certainly Byzantine layer becomes readable. In fact, it must be said that the Longobards, first, and the Normans, then, are limited to the role of client, entrusting local workers with the construction of construction works according to traditions, techniques and forms. This is demonstrated by the intervention of Jacopo of Stigliano, who grafted on the external walls a crenellated curtain of regular shape. The cement makers, master masons of Uggiano, for the thickness of the walls take as reference the periplando (44.62 cm), a small variant of that introduced by Liutprando. The Byzantine nucleus characterizes the lower part of the boundary wall of the North and South wing. The southern wall, currently with the cantilevered shoe completely without the support of the eroded or landslided terrain, is certainly a pre-Norman construction, characterized by rough wall with river pebbles and quarry stones with irregular courses linked with mortar, without formal claims, given that the populations defend themselves "not in beauty .. "sed munitiones constrentes". To this wall, in a later period, a shoe was added against the overturning towards the valley and the top battlements. The precise identification of the origin of the building material can be a useful tool for critical reading of the disappeared center; the quarries have mainly operated in defined historical periods and this allows the dating and use of the materials themselves. It must be said that in the case of Uggiano the use of stone is somewhat limited, as this is scarcely present on site: in this context the stone takes on simple forms.
From what little can be found in situ today, from what is more intuitive from the photographs of more than thirty years ago, it must be agreed that what was built on the hill of Uggiano has its own constructive lexicon and somewhat evolved expressive forms for the training of workers, for construction site equipment and construction techniques.
Just think of the recently fallen tower and the pointed arch, which denotes the entrance to the rooms of the castellanus, made with regular and perfectly squared sandstone ashlars. The decorative typology of the arch frieze with stylized leaves and berries is a recovery of Norman architecture ascribable between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, as evidenced by the inscription on the side of the arch. It is undoubtedly one of the first examples in Basilicata of the conceptual path that defined this new structural form which is the arch capable of channeled flows of forces, urging the material only with compression efforts even if not uniform, those efforts more congenial to the material and to the historical intuition and to the interpretation of the balance of the ancients. The arch of Uggiano alone constitutes an accomplished architecture and accompanies, for seven centuries, the history of this fortified village. The pointed arch also allows the medieval architects of Basilicata to better explain their new constructive conception: the arch, as we said, channeled flows of forces that tend to overturn the supports towards the outside, which in order to resist the thrust they must have a considerable weight. The pointed arch, due to its particular geometry, albeit with the same weight, compared to a round arch, releases a less inclined force than the vertical and transmits a lower horizontal thrust to the supports. That is, the effect of overturning to the outside is less, and therefore the supports can be slimmer and lighter and this is certainly the reason why the Angevin arch, unlike the almost all other arches that collapsed, has arrived till us. On the compositional level, the height of the arch is not strictly related to its width, in our case the dimensions are 4.10 x 5.00.
The determination of the stresses on the kidney (at 30 ° above the horizontal) highlights the absence of cracks, but the expulsion of the key segment, an event that is not remote if there is no timely intervention, will break the secular balance of the structure and will originate the collapse of the equilateral pointed arch. Currently it would seem absurd to think of a conservation project of what has survived, but, precisely in consideration of the scattered traces of the disappeared centers, a conservation project of the original structural concept is needed, capable of respecting the balance that has been established overall Uggiano with the passage of time, capable of containing the definitive decay of the sparse structures and of ensuring their use to make them live again in the testimony of their original values, of the transformations that in any case are part of their history. The conservation intervention should include the analysis of the static instabilities of the only tower and the parts of surviving walls and a better knowledge of the materials for the determination of operating criteria for the real safety of the site. The use of the ruins as historical memory would require an indifferent enhancement project that should include the creation of routes in the vicinity of the area and on the esplanade and signals that direct the use of the property in its context. This project will thus perpetuate the reading of the different historical periods and the materials that characterized them, through which the systematically collected memory will be able to find new enrichment references and new confirmations.
