The Grid and the Rain. The Meteorological Series of the Bari Observatory

At times, rain in Bari became catastrophe. The Meteorological Observatory housed within the Ateneo preserved its traces – in notebooks, in graphs, in the measured language of science. In 1926, the institution depended administratively on the Istituto Tecnico “Pitagora”, yet it continued to operate atop the Palazzo Ateneo, where barometers, thermometers, and rain gauges translated the instability of the sky into orderly sequences of numbers. That same year’s flood – between 5 and 6 November 1926, which devastated entire neighbourhoods – did not halt the Institute’s classes, but it demanded the direct involvement of its students. A team from the Surveying Section, led by Professor Alberto Bevilacqua and his assistant Vito Brunetti, was dispatched for two weeks to the worst-affected areas, while others assisted in dormitories and emergency shelters. Meanwhile, Professor Amedeo Nobile, physicist and technical observer, began compiling what would become one of the Observatory’s most comprehensive reports. Nobile reconstructed the pluviometric data over a period of nearly fifty years, enriching them with tables and graphs. The chart for “Rainfall in millimetres (Quantità di pioggia in millimetri)” for November 1926 recorded 170.3 mm, of which 160.8 mm fell between 9 a.m. on 4 November and 9 a.m. on 6 November. An extraordinary value, though not unique: the previous November had measured 172.6 mm, and the absolute maximum occurred in November 1916, with 276.2 mm, even if the most devastating flood had struck earlier, in February 1915. Numbers may seem cold, yet within their grid one can still read the story of flooded streets, homes buried in mud, lives overturned. Thanks to the work of Nobile and his predecessors, the flood of 1926 did not remain merely a painful memory told through newspapers or photographs. It was transformed into data, graphs, and tables – into a scientific memory that transcended reportage. Bari thus learned that rain is not only sudden ruin: it is also a datum, a measure, a prediction. And that only by recording it patiently, day after day, can disaster be turned into knowledge – and memory into understanding.

___Stefano Daniele & Francesco Paolo de Ceglia