History – Villa Barberino

The History

The Restructuring

Twenty years. It took twenty years to finish a huge job. The state of Villa Barberino in 1988 was unimaginable.

Slowly over the years of abandonment the brambles, plants, trees, climbers, grasses, took up space between the stones and began a slow and frightening wear and tear, which in a few years completely hid the facades of the houses in the village.

Everything appeared green. A jungle crept into the rooms, alleys, walls, farmyards. The rain had seeped into the roofs, had torn open some points and the attics had given way due to the great humidity.

The gardens in front of the villa were no longer gardens.

Mountains of rubble had accumulated over time and some inhabitants of the area used some spaces to unload all kinds of solid waste on them.

The exterior plasterwork of the villa was gray and mostly discarded. They could be seen under stones and bricks built on top of each other.

The window frames were completely discarded by the ravages of atmospheric agents and the mouth-blown glass of the eighteenth century was mostly smashed perhaps by the stupid games of some boy in the village.

The ceiling beams had torn, the tiles had shattered, the floors pulverized. The load-bearing walls of the houses had cracks on all sides.

The doors no longer existed, at the top of some flights of stairs there were chasms as high as ten meters suspended in the void.

Desolation was the absolute protagonist of a lonely and abandoned stage.

Some men of the village had taken advantage of the ruins to obtain chicken coops, garages or fences in some safer corners where to let the dogs sleep.

The most dangerous and unsafe structures had been surrounded by barbed wire. But the latter had disappeared in a short time, covered by nettles in summer and brambles all year round.

The ground floors, where the stables had been located in the previous decades, had completely disappeared from human sight.

Outside, trees of all kinds, grass and rubble blocked the view from going any further.

Inside, however, the collapsed tiles with the roof beams and the destroyed attics of the upper floors had completely devastated the entrances and covered everything.