Hello everyone! We are the Antelope Squadron of the Molfetta Scout Group 2, and today we'll be talking to you about of one of the places we visited:
Underground Gravina
Underground Gravina, nominated for Italian Capital of Culture 2028 and proposed for UNESCO ricognition, has 2000 hypogea which were created around the 17th century.
In the cave that we visited, we can notice the presence of tuff, a. Type of material which was used to build the building of that period. The tuff was drawn by caves of 15-20 meters tall and these caves had different function: wineries to produce and preserve wine, thanks to the all year constant temperature between 10 and 15 degrees; but also as silos, small room that were used to preserve wheat and cereals. This is why Gravina takes his name from the
presence of these products, infact Gravina derives from the Latin term “Grana et Vino”. Also its chat-of-arms is represented by an ear of wheat and a bunch of grapes.
In the first room you can notice a wine press, which is from the beginning of the 19th century, made of oak wood. Under the press they is a platform, made of waterproof rock to not let the wine be absorbed, on it was out a vase that contained grapes. To obtain wine you needed to lower the press ad then the wine would flow in a canal and, once arrived, it passed through a small hole and then it was poured into a vase. Preserve and produce wine meant a fatal damage for healt because these rooms, being small, presented elevated levels of carbonic dioxide, and you could die with it. To solve this problem and avoid death, the decided to create some grates from which fresh air could come in and out and you could communicate with nearby wineries in case of danger.
Many of these undergrounds were really helpful during the Second World Wide War because they were used as bunkers where people reunited to sheild from enemy attacks. Continuing we find a structure, similar to a chimney, that in reality is a black well, used by the owners to do their needs. When the well was full, the materials were taken and used as fertilizers and, to avoid unpleasant smells, threw ash or quicklime to hide the smell and hygienize the well. Over it we find a statue of a sphinix, made many years later, which shows the differences between the modern tuff (worked and smoothed), which has a lighter colour, and the ancient one (not worked), which has a darker colour given by the presence of water and absorbing of mold, because the tuff is a material that tends to absorb.
To extract tuff, the workers created blocks which were brought to the surface and were used to. Build the owner’s house. The wall of the room below is covered by oblique lines that correspond to the pavement’s outlines. These signs are also given by the movements made by the tools used by the workers. Gradually going down into the dephts, they created new steps which were built with the “Palm technique” because the height of each step is as tall as the palm of a hand. The method used to separate the blocks from the pavement consisted in using a pickaxe which created the frame of the block, then the workers used hammers and saws which helped to separate the blocks, applying further pressure on the floor. Once the blocks were extracted they could have weighted between 100 and 150 kilos and you need to cut them to bring them to the surface. If the blocks weren’t big enough, the workers would curry them by hand; although if they were to big and heavy, they used
pulleys mounted and tied with ropes that transported the blocks to the surface. Near the wall we can find a cord called “Plumb cord” which was positioned there by the speleologists to help us understand that the walls aren’t straight and perpendicular, infact they tend to shrink on the surface creating a sport of bell structure that avoided the collapse of the undergrounds and caves during earthquakes. To build the bell structure, beacause originally the rooftop was straight, the workers, once they went down deep, went back up thank to wooden rafters that were the scaffolding and that were stuck in the walls because of some holes which were than used to put candles in them that meant to light the room. 150 years were needed to build all the underground.
As we said the undergrounds were also used as cisterns full of rain water. The cistern was connected to the kitchen of the house built on it to make supplies if water was missing. Since the undergrounds were built under the owners’ houses, only rich people could afford a cistern. As time passed the owner closed the cistern after the establishment of the aqueduct, and so the remaining water dried and created about one meter of mud.
Continuing our route we came across a second underground where the structure was similar to the one we talked about before, but the difference is that this one was used like a real habitation, used during the Middle Ages until the fifties of the 20th century. This underground has more rooms which were shared by families related to each other. One the most annoying probems to cope with was the water inflirtation, because when it constantly rained the caves would inondate.
Another problem was the absence of grates, because the air couldn’t be changed regularly and the families couldn’t light a fire in the cave to warm themself. To not be cold, families decided to not use fire but the heat of the animals, thanks to their presence in the underground. Outside the cave they did all the activities that couldn’t be done inside such as cooking. One of the biggest problems was the lack of hygiene, given the poor cleanliness of that time, and because inside that underground there was a single black well, which was used by more families.
Once they starter to build the house, these undergrounds were completely abandoned and became real stores where people left things that they didn’t use anymore or were used as stalls which contained animals. We know this because we found a real manger, created in the fifties. During the time of plague and cholera poor people couldn’t be buried and, because they were burned, they said that the soul of the deceased wouldn’t pass in the afterlife. So poor people, to give a worthy burial to the dearest, decided to put them in a room of the underground creating real mass graves. Infact for th same reason, being poor, they couldn’t enter churches, and so they engraved real roods on the undergrounds’ walls, which were interpreted as a protection symbol against wars, sickness, etc… The last room of the underground has a tool which was used to produce wine, But this time the technique is different: the wine was produced with the Palamento which is a pavement ed tub where there were bunches of grapes that were crushed by feet or with rafters inside it; then the wine ended up in a faucet which brought it into the barrels which were closed to leave it fermenting.
The last stop of our trip was at the roman bridge or aqueduct bridge that connects Gravina. The bridge was built by the Orsini family around 1740 and 1780. The material used is always the tuff, extracted in the new zone. The bridge is known as roman even if it wasn’t built by them but only because it remembers the structure of one of them. it is also known as the aqueduct bridge because inside the left wall there is a little pipe, which is changed periodically, where the water runs. The water is collected from the nearby hill, called Bortomagno, which in the past represented Gravina’s nucleus; with the arrival of the Romans, the hill was called Silvium, which in Latin means woods, and it became for them a rental center. Still today we can find on the hill the remaining road of the “Via Appia” that connects Gravina with the principal ports of Apulia. When the Romans lived in Gravina, they found an aquifer, an underground river, and thanks to it they created an aqueduct 7 meters tall and 3.5 kilometers long. The end of the roman aqueduct is inside a small house situated near the bell tower of the church, on the other side of the bridge, in which there is the “tub of the decantation” that needed to clean all the aqueduct water. When the bridge was built, inside the small house, they added a little pipe, the one inside the left wall, which needed to transport water from one side to the other. The water, once arrived on the other side of the bridge, was released inside a pylon, a tank used by the women in the fifties to wash the clothes. In the hill’s adjacent part there is a real necropolis because the cemeteries were situated outside the city.
