The “Casa degli Alluvionati” in Bari. Stone, Memory, Propaganda

On every stone lintel, above each doorway, the same solemn inscription is carved in Roman capitals: “Alluvione VI novembre MCMXXVI.” It is not merely a date, but a wound in stone – a scar of memory. Those words greet anyone who passes through the entrances of the large building occupying the block between Via Nicolai, Via Martiri d’Otranto, and Via Don Bosco, in Bari’s Libertà district. This is the so-called Casa degli alluvionati – the “House of the Flood Victims” – built between the late 1920s and early 1930s to shelter those who had lost everything between the 5th and 6th of November 1926. Nineteen dead, fifty injured, whole blocks submerged: the city awoke in mud. Yet solidarity soon took architectural form. The Istituto Fascista Autonomo per le Case Popolari commissioned engineer Giuseppe Favia to design a large residential block for the homeless survivors of the flood. The result was an imposing, self-contained structure – a kind of citadel: five storeys, ten portals, and long, disciplined rows of windows. Its rigidity is softened by four chamfered corners, each with twin entrances bearing the same epigraph: “Alluvione VI novembre MCMXXVI.” Nearly a century later, the building still preserves the marks of fascist architecture: monumental proportions, geometric austerity, and a symbolic severity. On the façade facing the former tobacco factory stands a marble aedicule. Between two weathered columns crowned with the Savoy coat of arms, an eagle dominates the scene – ancient Roman emblem and, under the regime, sign of renewed imperial ambition. On the opposite side, an iron gate opens onto an interior courtyard, a small enclosed garden. Yet even here, greenery is framed by two fasci littori carved into the gateposts, and a length of rusting barbed wire stretches across the top – an unintentional image of what this building embodied: an architecture conceived to protect, yet also to contain. Those who once crossed its thresholds carried in their eyes the memory of the rising waters that had swept everything away. The families rehoused here entered new dwellings born from loss. Each lintel reminded them, in unyielding stone, of the date of the flood – a silent witness above their heads. Thus the Casa degli alluvionati became not only a refuge but a monument: a response in stone to the liquid menace of the waters. And behind the regime’s rhetoric – which sought to turn suffering into monumentality – endures the human truth of those who lived within these walls: men and women who had learned, in Bari as throughout Apulia, that rain can be salvation or ruin, promise or condemnation.

___Stefano Daniele & Francesco Paolo de Ceglia