The Torri Costiere and the coastal landscape of Molise, Italy

Ref.: 250
Key theme: 03 Visual integrity of historic urban landscapes
Date of reception: 15/11/2008

AUTHORS (*Main author)

PRETELLI, Marco * (Italy) - Università del Molise

ABSTRACT

Molise is a little region in central-southern Italy, facing the Adriatic Sea. It is not very famous indeed to tourists, even if it is situated between the well touristically known Gargano, in Puglia region and Vasto, in Abruzzo region.
Its coastal landscape, after the WWII, appeared not so different from the one Goethe or another grand tour traveller in the 18th-19th century could had seen, quite deserted also because of some malarial wetlands (dried in the Fifties) and for a long tradition of peasant and shepherd culture, well tied to the hills and the mountains behind the coast on which, at the end of XVIII century, there still could be met Saracen pirates.
There was just a fishermen village, Termoli, and a series of coastal towers, wanted by the Spanish Emperor Charles V, built since the midst of the 16th century every 5-10 km, to prevent the attacks coming from the sea by Saracen pirates, based in the eastern coast of Adriatic Sea, on which the Ottoman Turks remained until WWI.
The coastal towers are part of one of the largest defensive building systems probably ever developed in the whole world, with the Chinese Great Wall and the British Adrian's Wall.
A series of more than 350 towers, 200 still existing, the cruxes of a defensive net well tied to villages and masserie (a typical fortified farm of the eastern part of southern Italy) that as soon as possible can react as an unique body to the dangers coming from the sea. They were located in the most prominent sites of the coast from Martinsicuro, on the Adriatic Sea, to Scauri, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, every one well visible from the one before and the one after that. Sometime they stand just some meters from the seaside, sometime some hundreds meters from it, on a height. Some of them are well visible still today, running on the state road.
Their presence signed landscape of the whole Regno delle Due Sicilie (the reign that had ruled the south Italy before the reunification of the country in 1860) for centuries, showing the presence of the central power, discouraging enemies and permitting communications by mirrors.
Italan reunification and the vanishing of the danger of the pirates sounded the death knell for the towers. Due to the poorness of the building materials and to the lack of attention, they started to decay; sometime new buildings, built in the last decades, hid them, changing the coastal landscape.
They can also be seen as the precursor of the string city that cover the Adriatic coast. In the 35 km long Molise coast there are still five, one of which well surrounded by new building, one incorporated in an ancient castle, one transformed in a restaurant and two still isolated but quite ruined. Their material bodies have to be preserved and their memory reintegrated in the landscape, as well as in the touristic use of this land.

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