Scars of Stone. The Flood Plaques in Bari’s Libertà and Murat Districts

Not all memories are written in books: some remain etched into the walls. Walking through Bari’s Murat district toward the Libertà quarter, one can still stumble upon stone plaques that mark the height reached by floodwaters during the inundations of 1905, 1915, and 1926. At first glance, they look like modest urban signs, but they are, in truth, scars – traces of a city’s body wounded more than once. The plaques are set at the corners of busy, working-class streets: in the commercial heart of the city – Via Calefati, Via Garruba, Via Quintino Sella, the lower part of Via Carducci – and in the historic Libertà district – Via Trevisani, Via Crisanzio, Via Bovio, the upper part of Via Carducci – where water, mud, and debris once poured through. Each number carved into stone restores the vertical dimension of disaster: the water rising, silent and relentless, up to the point marked by human hands. It was a technical gesture, bureaucratic perhaps, yet one that still chills the observer a century later. The floods of 1905 and 1915 had already been severe, but it was the catastrophe of 1926 that impressed upon the collective memory the true scale of destruction: streets turned to torrents, houses swept away, entire neighborhoods swallowed in mud. Together, the plaques recount a chronology of fragility – not a single accident, but the obstinate recurrence of a fate inscribed in the geology of the Bari basin, and worsened by unchecked urban expansion. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Libertà district. Born at the end of the nineteenth century between the swamp of Marisabella and the gasworks, it had grown ever denser: 2,3 inhabitants per room in 1881, and many more in the decades that followed. Modest dwellings, poorly served streets, precarious drainage – Libertà had promised urban redemption but became instead an epicentre of vulnerability. Each flood found easy passage, turning roads into canals and courtyards into ponds. These plaques, set into the walls, do not celebrate heroes or victories. They are mute warnings, forcing today’s passer-by to lift their gaze and wonder: what if the water came back?

___Stefano Daniele & Francesco Paolo de Ceglia