[...] My first impression was that of a place contained on him self, wrapped around an invisible, monastic and claustrophobic secret. The insufficient afternoon light and the first autumnal dense fog imposed this feeling on the conscience, and they worried it.
San Giovanni in Fiore in the fog.
photography: Francesco Saverio Alessio © copyright 1998
San Giovanni in Fiore
My Hometown
San Giovanni in Fiore (1050 mt. about sea level) is a medieval town in the Sila mountain range in Calabria. It has a population about 18.000, but half of them have emigrated to other places.
San Giovanni in Fiore was founded in the XIII century around the Florens Abbey which was built by Joachim of Flora (Gioacchino da Fiore), a medieval mystic and Cistercian monk, who wrote a lot of books about the prophecy of the salvation of the human race; for which he was very renowend even that time.
Florensian Abbey; San Giovanni in Fiore
photography: Francesco Saverio Alessio © copyright 1981
The mystical basis of his teaching is the doctrine of the "Eternal Gospel," founded on a strained interpretation of the text in the Apocalypse (xiv, 6). There are three states of the world, corresponding to the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity. In the first age the Father ruled, representing power and inspiring fear, to which the Old Testament dispensation corresponds; then the wisdom hidden through the ages was revealed in the Son, and we have the Catholic Church of the New Testament; a third period will come, the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, a new dispensation of universal love, which will proceed from the Gospel of Christ, but transcend the letter of it, and in which there will be no need for disciplinary institutions.
Joachim of Flora; Edmund G. Gardner, The Catholic Encyclopedia - The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VIII - Copyright © 1910 by Robert Appleton Company
Florensian Abbey: detail of the portal with traces of fire; photography Salvatore Mirarchi © copyright, 2000
The oldest neighborhoods grew out from the abbey, and it is interesting to note the cluster of concentric buildings just to its north.
The urban centre of San Giovanni in Fiore is located on Monte Difesa at an elevation of 950 to 1.170 m. The city is is located behind Sila Grande on the eastern side of the plateau and opposite a valley which affects the climate and the meteorological conditions.
Florens Abbey; photograpy: Domenico Olivito
Roots
Many of the town’s sons and daughters return to find their roots. San Giovanni in Fiore is also well positioned to explore the Sila Mountains, its forests and lakes with sports activities all year round, as well as neighboring villages and historic sites.
In the poem My Hometown Rina Ferrarelli describes the nostalgia she feels for the hometown and her pride in her roots, also she talks about how the old town is full of unused empty houses which were built by past generations of people from San Giovanni in Fiore for their children, but their children have never come back to San Giovanni in Fiore to live in these houses.
The Bread We Ate; Rina Ferrarelli
Guernica Editions, Spring 2012
Traditional coloured motifs bedspreads: Ozaturu; handicraft production
San Giovanni in Fiore now
I don't see a positive future for San Giovanni in Fiore unless there a change of political class and the development of the tourist industry.
Beyond the goldsmith tradition, in the course of the History, the woven is the one that characterized the handicraft production of San Giovanni in Fiore, with bedspreads and trousseaus with strongly coloured geometrical motifs, some directly inspired by those of the hellenic colonists who in their turn had been instructed by Persian craftsmen. It’s useless to say that, beyond small sporadic examples, currently this tradition is practically extinct.
Despite its rich history and natural beauty San Giovanni in Fiore today is in a state of economic and cultural ruin, beacause of mass emigration, political degradation and the failure of traditional culture.
Francesco Saverio Alessio
Links
This is a section of the site dedicated to the Mediterranean Architecture and that, going from the Mezquita de Cordoba to the Tiberius's Villa Iovis in Capri, from the Adalberto Libera's Villa Malaparte always in Capri until the Francesco Venezia's Gibellina Museum, from the Le Corbusier's Ronchamp Chapel to the Abbazia Florens of Gioacchino da Fiore and Luca Campano through the undergrounds of Naples, the underground architecture of the Greek Roman caverns exposed to the XVII Triennale of Milan, the ages, the cultural migrations, the Urbanism and Etno-Psychiatry, sometimes the losses, sometimes the contaminations, through various values and the religions, the aesthetic valences, with the contribution of personal written and of others Authors, of photography's, designs and other types of iconographic representations, 3d rendering, cad, videos, wants indicate a reflection course on this argument.
