Lou païsatge dë marmou

I am not a photographer but an architect who use the photographic medium as a tool to knowledge, investigate and measure architecture and landscape. Italy is an anthropized land since ancient times, as a matter of fact even the alpine wilderness is altered by human history. I grew up in a land at the foot of the Alps, closer to France than to Turin, a land where for centuries two religions, two languages and in the past two kingdoms have coexisted often alternating wars and peace. The study of Savoy baroque architecture led me to research the origins in the Alps of the marbles of ducal magnificence. Where do the columns, decorations and sculptures of palaces and churches come from? Who worked in the mountains to extract it? How did they altered the landscape, what signs remain intact under the contemporary landscape traces? Among written texts, archive documents and historical maps I collected elements to find in the landscape of the Val Germanasca a story of forgotten men in a territory full of traces of a complex history. In the periods of peace between the wars of religion, this impervious valley once called Valle Oscura (Dark Valley), it was a territory closed like an Alpine ghetto for Protestants. Here Occitan was and is still spoken, not italian, nor piedmontese nor french. From 1600 to 2200 meters, among the larches and stony ground, starting from XVII century, the marble was carved and worked at the Rocho Blancho, the Rocho Couërbo, moved on the Vio dë marmou and cutted at La Réiso. Rocca Bianca and Rocca Corba, the two main marble quarries of San Martino. This was the marble of Venaria Reale, Palazzo Reale, the Church of the Consolata. The Via dei Marmi designed by the ducal architect Amedeo di Castellamonte and the marble sawmill, tell the story of the men who worked behind the great architecture of the past and how, by hand and bodies, they modified the Alpine landscape. The signs of their life, hidden and forgotten in the natural environment, are engraved on the rock as a matrix of those distant works of art are a memory of political power in the city. Below the photographs of the Rocca Bianca quarry, certainly active since the 17th century, located on a ridge at 2200 metres, where a community of stonemasons worked in isolation. The houses there were built with marble waste and their names engraved during the period of peace between the religious wars. The Rocca Corba quarry, a huge hall dugs into the mountain wall with the tip and the mallet. The inclined plane along which the large blocks were lowered onto the larch trunks, still visible among the woods and stony ground. Between these pictures those of Piazza dell'Annunziata in Venaria Reale, where the statues of the evangelists, the archangel gabriel and the Santa Annunziata where made of this marble. This portfolio is an extract from a larger work in progress on the marbles of the Turin Alps. This work on the ancient quarries of white statuary marble of San Martino has never been published. The shooting work went on the 2023, also due to the place isolation and difficulty of reaching them, which require hiking for hours. 

HISTORICAL NOTES

Rocca Bianca (2384 m above sea level) or Roccho Blancho in Occitan is a peak located along the mountain ridge between the Faetto and the San Martino valley, the current Germanasca valley. The toponym immediately identifies the appearance of its marble front visible from Chisone valley. The white marble, originating in the pre-Triassic from the alteration of the deposits of the Ligurian-Piedmontese ocean, has a statuary quality which not escaped from the observation and use by the superintendents of the Duke of Savoy's factories. The statuary quality of the marble was such that its use was reserved and exclusive to the Duke of Savoy. We find traces of its use since the early 1600 in the Church of the Consolata in Torino. In 1561 with the Peace of Cavour, the Duke of Savoy Emanule Filiberto established the right to publicly profess the reformed Waldensian religion in the valleys of Luserna, Perosa and San Martino. For centuries, until the Letters Patent of 1848, these valleys became an enclave of the reformed Protestant world.

The particular geographical location, the proximity to the French dominions, where numerous and combative groups of reformed lived, the increasingly close exchanges with Geneva and the other non-Catholic Cantons had guaranteed the Waldensian communities relative tranquility. But between April 17 and early May 1655 the Marquis Giacinto de Simiane di Pianezza, with the aid of the French militias destined to the siege of Pavia and the Irish mercenaries, they chased the Waldenses away over the mountains and sacked the valleys, burning houses, churches, villages and exterminating the population, in what were remembered as the Piedmontese Easters. The Patente di Grazia of Pinerolo on 1655 August 18 put an end to the persecution by restoring the Pace di Cavour. On 1664 February 14, with the Peace Treaty of Turin, the war of the bandits was put to an end and twenty years of peace began in the Waldensian valleys. In those same years the ducal architect Amedeo di Castellamonte, supervisor of the project and works of the Venaria Reale palace, widely used marble from the Valle di S. Martino, the marble from Rocca Bianca. Since the quarry was located at 2200 meters of altitude, the importance of the road for transporting the blocks was fundamental. Thus, between 1673 and 1674 the Marble Road or the Vio dî marmou (occ.) was restored, whose route and bridges had been destroyed during the wars of persecution of the Protestant populations confined in the Valley.