Dry-stone walls rising ragged and solitary among trees and mountain meadows; windows lighting empty rooms strewn with rubble, uninhabited for years, for decades; broken roofs, closed doors that no longer protect anything or anyone. Around these ruined houses, the “wooden ploughs, sledges and household goods” have also vanished, just as one can no longer find among the rubble “the papers of an old ‘family archive’” or “the complete correspondence of an Alpine soldier who was lost on the Russian front”.[1] These were things Nuto Revelli had discovered in the 1970s during his many journeys through the Stura Valley of Demonte, undertaken precisely to give a voice back to the last remaining farmers, to what he would call “the world of the defeated”. During the years of Revelli’s research, a few final inhabitants could still be found among the “poor huts choked by nettles, brambles and elder bushes”:[2] surviving lives spent toiling in the fields and struggling against poverty. One could still encounter solitary old people, often born in the late nineteenth century, who held on and told their stories, happy to find in him someone intent on listening and on valuing their memories, whether good or bad.
By 2007, however, when Alessandro Vicario photographed the stone houses and abandoned farm buildings of the hamlets and villages of the Stura Valley, very few people remained to bear witness to that past. The hamlets were now entirely depopulated. Yet at Chiotti Soprano the photographer came across a solitary shepherd, Angelo Bruno, the hamlet’s only and last inhabitant. This book is dedicated to him. Nor had the process of restoration yet begun that would allow the village of Paraloup to come back to life—the restoration was completed in 2013—and become a symbol and a testimony to a lost civilisation. This civilisation is not only part of our history: it also embodies values and roots that need to be recovered as we look towards a future in which the mountains can once again be a resource.
The early 2000s were therefore an interval in time, when houses emptied completely by the exodus from the mountains showed only an absence of lived experience, only forgotten stories, inexorably past and thus increasingly difficult to understand or imagine. In other words, this was the historical moment when destruction was almost complete after a slow, irreversible decline: a true “end of an era”. Yet it gave Vicario the opportunity to document the reality of abandoned homes and stables, an extinct world that he recorded just before other possible changes arrived. Through his photographs, we see the meagre, silent remains of the mountain hamlet of Paraloup. This also allows us to appreciate how respectful, yet innovative, the restoration work has been in transforming it into an important cultural centre and a place of hospitality. His subtly documentary images thus have the value of precise visual testimony recorded at a particular moment in the valley’s history.
But there is more. Something lies beneath the apparent simplicity and sobriety of his framing, which deliberately rejects the romantic aesthetic of ruins, all showy beauty, and the bright, saturated colours typical of photographs intended to appeal to the tourist imagination. Respectful and free of rhetoric, these images seek to give a face and a voice to ruins that still withstand the weather and the ravages of passing time. Alongside more descriptive images offering clear overall views, Vicario therefore draws close enough to “take samples” of walls and old, gnarled beams marked by human labour and by their relationship with nature. He then enters the abandoned houses to show flaking walls and old ovens that seem to want to tell the stories of those who lived there.
As in several of his other projects, Alessandro Vicario tenaciously seeks to gather a series of concrete signs and traces, perhaps muted, yet capable of raising questions and evoking the past, the gestures and the lived experiences of those who inhabited these places for years. Church. Last Mass, 7 July 1943 can still be read on the wall of a building that has lost its roof. The message is clear and terse, yet it invites us to ask what could have happened in those distant days of war, and to imagine it: was this church destroyed by the Fascists and the Germans in reprisal? Perhaps it was, or perhaps not, since the partisan struggle obviously began a little later, in September 1943. What, then, happened to the church that July? We do not know, and this ignorance troubles and questions us.
Alessandro Vicario also observes broken walls, eroded façades rising unexpectedly among the woods, wooden doors barred against nothingness. He stands before them, draws closer, as though seeking to capture their strength and dignity despite human neglect and the passage of time, which helps nature reclaim the abandoned houses. Yet these same structures once drew their substance from nature, because everything there, even what people had made, was an integral part of the natural landscape: the stones in the walls, the moss-thickened thatched roofs still surviving at La Comba, the twisted, knotty wooden beams. Now, however, nature relentlessly besieges these last ruins, crushing them beneath heaps of snow and surrounding them with weeds, nettles, roots and encroaching branches.
Branches and trunks appear in Vicario’s images sometimes with attention and clarity, sometimes indirectly, through their shadows cast upon the walls. Memory and imagination are thus stirred not only by the few visible traces of this vanished world, not only by the scattered surviving elements shown close up, but also by what is not directly visible, what remains outside the frame and makes itself present only as a shadow. Besides making the absent present, these shadows become metaphors for the fleetingness of time and seem to suggest that our gaze must learn to reach beyond outward appearances. It is as though Vicario’s images were telling us that the humble stones of the abandoned houses of the Stura Valley are not merely stones, but traces from which to begin exploring and questioning the past.
This invitation to probe with our gaze and memory, to know how to listen to the last traces of times gone by, is further emphasised by the short passages placed beside some of the images. They are drawn from the account of the shepherd Angelo Bruno, interviewed by Roberta Marocco during 2007, and from Nuto Revelli’s celebrated book Il mondo dei vinti. These quotations from the accounts of interviewed farmers are not intended, here in Vicario’s work, to explain the images. Rather, they engage with them as a counterpoint, intervening as “voices” that emerge like sounds from the past to bring barred doors and ruined houses back to life. They are intense, unadorned “voices” that go straight to the facts, describing them with a frankness and simplicity to which we are no longer accustomed.
We used paraffin for light, for lighting: paraffin and salt were the only things we bought. My grandfather told me he had lived even worse. In the last century, some people ate snakes: they cut them up and seasoned them with a little red salt, livestock salt, and with potatoes the snakes were good.
So, for example, recalls Pietro Bagnis, born in 1890. It is only a few words, yet they are enough to reveal a world, a way of living and feeling. Beside this passage we see three images that are equally essential and direct: an empty room with a single bright window, then a roof torn open, and finally a wooden door photographed frontally. Pietro Bagnis’s words are therefore not closely related to the photographs, yet they seem to resonate through those bare spaces like a distant echo, or to shine like a faint reflection lighting them obliquely. In this way, the words lend those spaces a further substance and physical presence, however fleeting and indistinct it may be. The shadow of a distant memory and the spare words of an old voice briefly bring back to life the empty rooms where no one walks any more. And the vanished “world of the defeated” seems to be here among us again, even if only for a moment that is soon lost. Texts and images thus refer back to one another, forming a complex weave in which the photographer’s gaze and the storytellers’ voices meet in the name of memory.
[1] Nuto Revelli, Il mondo dei vinti, Einaudi, Turin, 1977, p. XXV.
[2] Nuto Revelli, op. cit., p. LX.
2015
