Pietro Laureano · UNESCO Consultant
«Every day the death of an old person, the abandonment of a village by a farmer, determines the disappearance of a library of local knowledge indispensable to face new challenges.»
Africa Forum, Rome 2008
There is a question worth asking before talking about restoration, funding, housing units or governance: why a baglio? Not as an aesthetic choice. As an answer to what?
The answer is written in the long time — in the millennia in which Mediterranean man learned, by trial and error, to build a space in which one lives well with heat, with drought, with scarcity and, above all, with others. The Sicilian baglio is not an invention. It is the last link in a very long chain.
The genealogy of the baglio
واحة
Wāḥa
The oasis is not born of nature. It is born of the decision of a human group to stay — and to work together to wrest fertility from the sand. Rainwater collection, underground channels, trees planted in sequence to create microclimates: every oasis is a collective project of survival. Academic research on Mediterranean architecture says it clearly: «These are not settlements that arose spontaneously, but artificially created by the strength and cohesion of the human group». The oasis teaches that a place does not exist without the community that wants it.
Αὐλή
Classical Greece · 5th–4th century BCIn ancient Olynthus, houses opened inward, not toward the street. The central courtyard — the aulé — oriented to the south received the low winter sun and was shaded in summer by the overhang of the roof. Socrates explained it to his disciples as an elementary principle of good living: a house facing south, with high rooms to the north, is cool in summer and warm in winter with nothing more than geometry. It was not architecture for the rich. It was intelligence applied to climate, within everyone's reach.
Atrium
Rome · 2nd century BC – 5th century ADThe Roman domus adds two elements to the Greek principle: the atrium, which collects rainwater in a central basin — the impluvium — and the peristyle, an internal porticoed garden where the family ate in summer and took shelter in winter. Water collected from the atrium flowed into cisterns under the floor and was used to irrigate the vegetable garden. No waste, no external system: the building was autonomous because it had been designed to be so. Vitruvius describes the rules in detail, as if they were obvious: orientation, wall thickness, position of openings. A science, not a taste.
حوش
Ḥawsh
The Arabs bring to Sicily the desert version of the same principle: the house closes toward the outside as a compact block, thick walls that insulate from the heat, and opens toward the sky through an internal courtyard — the ḥawsh — where the water of a fountain cools the air by evaporation and vegetation filters the light. The narrow alleys of Sicilian Islamic cities — Mazara, Marsala, Palermo — follow the same principle: the mutual shade of buildings creates coolness without air conditioning. The Emirate of Sicily did not leave many buildings. It left a way of building that local stone absorbed and transmitted.
Baglio
Western Sicily · 15th–18th centuryThe baglio is the final synthesis. Walls of local limestone, high and thick, which in summer keep the cool and in winter radiate the accumulated heat. A single portal — defensive toward the outside, welcoming toward the inside. A closed courtyard that is at once a space for work, meeting and rest. Underground cisterns that collect every drop of rain. Loggias and porticoes that create shade in the hot hours. And always a space for the sacred: the chapel, at the centre or in the corner, as in the monastic villages that had inspired it. The baglio was not a palace. It was a system: self-sufficient, communal, designed to last generations without needing resources that were not already there, in the territory.
Baglio San Michele
Baglio San Michele is one of these places. Built in the 16th century in the Ragusa territory, it carries in its stone the memory of all this.
Its walls of local calcarenite have an average thickness of eighty centimetres: not for ostentation, but because that thermal mass keeps the internal temperature relatively constant all year round, without systems. The central courtyard was the heart of common life — work, meals, festivals, assemblies. The underground cistern collected winter rainwater and returned it in the dry months. The chapel marked the rhythm of time.
It was not nostalgia. It was competence: the knowledge accumulated over five thousand years of Mediterranean experience on how to build a space in which one lives well with little, where relationships between people and the relationship with the land are not added values but structural conditions of functioning.
The Borgo Ideale project is not restoring a monument. It is reactivating a system.
The thesis of the project
Baglio San Michele is not a historic building to be preserved.
It is a millennial technology to be put back into operation.
The historical and architectural references contained in this page are documented, among other sources, in the academic research of Lorena Musotto, «Sustainable settlements of the Mediterranean tradition», PhD, University of Naples Federico II, XXIII cycle. Pietro Laureano's quotation is taken from his address at the Africa Forum, Rome, 4 June 2008.