Magical Matera -20
Levi’s book caused an uproar in postwar Italy, and the Sassi became notorious as la vergogna nazionale, the disgrace of the nation. After a visit in 1950, Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi was so appalled that he set in motion a draconian plan to relocate the Sassi’s entire population to new housing developments.
Italy was flush with funds from the Marshall Plan, and American experts such as Friedrich Friedmann, a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas, arrived with Italian academics who had studied the mass rural relocation programs of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s. The new public houses were designed by Italy’s most avant-garde architects, in a misguided utopian vision that would actually isolate families in dismal, claustrophobic boxes.
Magical Matera -20
Levi’s book caused an uproar in postwar Italy, and the Sassi became notorious as la vergogna nazionale, the disgrace of the nation. After a visit in 1950, Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi was so appalled that he set in motion a draconian plan to relocate the Sassi’s entire population to new housing developments.
Italy was flush with funds from the Marshall Plan, and American experts such as Friedrich Friedmann, a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas, arrived with Italian academics who had studied the mass rural relocation programs of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s. The new public houses were designed by Italy’s most avant-garde architects, in a misguided utopian vision that would actually isolate families in dismal, claustrophobic boxes.