At the foot of the Apuan Alps, in Resceto, a small fraction of Massa (Massa Carrara), it is possible to take the famous Via Vandelli, a path of over three hundred years that reaches Modena and which in the Apuan stretch was also one of the most famous routes of Tuscany, or those roads built by quarrymen to transport marble from downstream quarries. To keep up the via di Lesceto of Resceto, on the Vandelli, still today there are only the dry stone walls, built with blocks of stone assembled without the use of binders, inserted in the intangible heritage of humanity by Unesco. Dry stone walls are the first example of a human artifact, present in all the cultures of the planet: the ancient Greeks and then the Romans built them, as did the Celts; it is mentioned in the Bible, the walls of the most ancient cities are made with huge blocks stuck dry, as well as the stepped pyramids of Latin America.
Now the Cai di Massa has noticed that on the via Vandelli the dry stone walls are about to crumble: a historical and artistic heritage at the mercy of man's neglect and subject to the constant work of nature that, simply, over the centuries, takes up spaces that were his. To save them, a collaboration was initiated between Cai di Massa, Cifa Italia, Fonarcom, an interprofessional fund for continuing education and IterEgo, recreating professionalism able to work for their maintenance and restructuring. "There are no more artisans able to deal with a drywall - explains Carmelo La Licata, coordinator of social projects and ancient crafts of Cifa Italia -. For this reason we decided to finance training courses, to teach ancient techniques and practices, indispensable when approaching a drywall ".
Two architects, Anna Della Tommasina, an expert in restoration, and Sauro Quadrelli, president of Cai di Massa, began a process of recovery of construction techniques and dry maintenance, a recovery made difficult by the almost total disappearance of competent craftsmen. Sponsored by the Italian Alpine Club and the Municipality of Massa, the first free course was held in September, for 8 employees of construction companies who were trained to become "drywall craftsmen in the town of Resceto". Their intervention served to recover part of the drywall that supports the Via Vandelli, and a part of Via di Lizza (Cai path no.168), reconstructing an ancient semi-collapsed wall of about 30 meters. "The workers who followed the course - always explains La Licata - boasted a twenty-year experience as masons, even of walls but, by their own admission, they used, sometimes and secretly, the mortar. With the course they understood that in that stone carapace there is no loose stone that needs a binder to remain in place, but a precise structural design in which the stone changes position, shape and size both in the vertical course of the wall and in the horizontal one ". The goal of Cifa Italia is to repeat the training courses for the "wall artisans" and to intervene on other critical issues, before time completely destroys those buildings.
In collaboration with:
Fonarcom