1926: Hands and Shovels Against the Mud

Mud tells more than a thousand chronicles. Between the 5th and 6th of November 1926, roughly 160.8 millimetres of rain fell over Bari in just forty-eight hours. The Lama Picone – swollen with water and burdened with debris – burst its banks and turned the city into a lake. The districts of Carrassi, Libertà, and Madonnella were overwhelmed: streets became torrents, homes and workshops drowned beneath the flood. The photographs of that November reveal the city’s bare and wounded face. In the first image, men and boys bend their backs, shovelling earth and water in a desperate attempt to restore dignity to the streets. It is a collective, almost ritual act: bodies sinking into their boots, gestures repeated endlessly, a community rebuilding itself – spade by spade. In another image, a farmer rides his cart through the high water, the donkey straining against the current. It is the portrait of a rural world forced to become seafaring, treating the street as though it were a river. By contrast, another shot captures a stalled automobile – modernity itself, turned into a clumsy raft in the mire. Before the deluge, class and technology ceased to matter: the mud levelled all distinctions, peasant and bourgeois, beast and machine. Even the trains were defeated. The city’s station was swallowed by sludge; the tracks became liquid labyrinths, the platforms disappeared beneath the current. The toll was severe: nineteen dead, fifty injured, and hundreds left homeless. Yet beyond the numbers, what strikes the observer is the physical force of these images: the muffled sound of shovels seems to echo still; one can almost sense the acrid smell of the mud rising from them. That morning of 6 November 1926, Bari awoke fragile – yet stubbornly alive. In those days, the city was forced to learn that rain is not always a celestial gift. It can suddenly become a river that breaks through your doorway, that stalls your new automobile, that drowns the tracks of the station, that forces you to grip a shovel and start again from nothing.

___ Stefano Daniele & Francesco Paolo de Ceglia