Interpretations and Sensitive Representations for the Documentation of Matera Vernacular Heritage

This contribution promotes the understanding of the historical heritage of one of the most iconic locations in Italy, the town of Matera in the Murgia. It addresses issues such as the representation, documentation and dissemination of this ancient heritage, carved into the living limestone, which still bears witness to peculiar knowledge and building traditions. The complex and heterogeneous, tangible and intangible heritage was analysed and described through life drawing and careful observations of the whole and of the detail, from a distance and from close, from top to bottom and from bottom to top. These numerous critical readings highlighted the preciousness of Matera's limestone materials, textures that characterise the “sassi”, the calcarenite vernacular dwellings representing the symbol of the town. It is always necessary, to transmit and enhance the material, chromatic, cultural, symbolic element that strongly distinguishes these assets, trying to convey, through sensitive representations, also the underlying intangible elements. A contemporary documentation of panoramas, landscapes and views of Sasso Barisano and Sasso Caveoso not only shows the state of conservation of the places but creates the prerequisite for their maintenance and enhancement. The spatial emotions that each place evokes are captured in on site drawings and realised with water technique without the use of preliminary pencil drawing, which, all together, constitute scientific material for the development and promotion of the urban area. In the context of cultural heritage scenario, the value of emotional and suggestive approaches to the representation of views or panoramas is valuable: the process triggered by drawing has great potential to understand and convey the heritage and can generate processes of regeneration and long-term sustainable development.