La luce in una stanza vuota. L'abitare ipogeo come forma identitaria del territorio meridionale

Living in the earth is an expression of an original condition of shelter, in which nature offers protection from the effects of itself, especially in those Mediterranean areas such as Puglia, Basilicata, Sicily, whose geological structure presents easily workable rocks. The action of digging expresses a primordial act of construction of an internal and safe space, a condition of internality opposed to the externality of nature that meets the need "not only to group under the same roof the family and its material goods, including animals, but to separate it clearly from the outside". However, the underground world is an expression of an authentic modernity that refers to the stereotomic origin of architecture and its liberation from the historicisation to which it has been subjected in the past: the transposition of the form of the primordial shelter of the cave, natural or made "by way of levare", into the concave form of the stereotomic stone room, constitutes a constructive rationalisation of the natural organic nature of caves, starting from the permanence of formal characteristics such as the unity of the form, the internality of the space, monomateriality, massiveness and structural continuity.