ROCCA DI VALLE DI CASTRIGNANO

A retractable external staircase leads to the first floor, the main living area of the fortified house. The trapdoor in the vaulted ceiling, in the south-west corner, also featured a removable staircase which, once retracted, ensured the building’s defence. Indeed, with no vertical access, even if the ground-floor door were broken down, no one would have been able to climb to the upper floors. At the same time, the trapdoor allowed access to the animals on the ground floor to tend to them and to feed oneself, without having to leave the building, thus avoiding exposure to attacks or dangers. The domestic space, or ‘fire room’, as Lucio Gambi called it, features, on the north-east side, a three-tiered sandstone washstand with drains for water to the outside. A window with a bench on the south-east side was used mainly by women to sit and carry out some tasks in the daylight. Despite Gambi’s apt description, the Malavilla shows no traces of a chimney: this feature, to which we now attribute a particular antiquity, only became widespread in rural buildings from the mid-1700s onwards. Prior to this period, other types of hearths existed, consisting of holes in the wall (sicconia) or in the roof, through which the smoke produced by a fire lit directly in the room could escape to the outside.