Architecture and Popular Devotion: The Double-Code for the Enhancement of the Salento Calvaries

The urban paths the religious communities made to celebrate the via crucis rite led to the “calvaries”, minor architectures that are the cultural expression of the community devotion. Several different architectural solutions corresponds to this typology. The best known are in northern Italy and in central-eastern Europe. The present paper investigates that architectures diffused in episodic form in Southern Italy, with a specific concentration in the Apulian Salento, where they are present in almost all the built-up areas. In this region the calvaries are built between the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century by private citizens. Originally they assumed an important role because sometimes they are the scenic backdrop of an extra-citizen road, or they are placed at centre of important crossroads or at the side of churches. The interest in these minor buildings arises not only for their particular architectural value, but because they are an expression of the community religious roots. The urban processional path of the via crucis and the architectures that served as a scenographic backdrop to the rite could be considered both as “intangible cultural heritage” to be safeguarded and as a memory of an urban scene connected to it, which today is difficult to recognize. The aim of the research through graphic transposition is to understand on a territorial scale the reasons for the concentration of the phenomenon in a specific and restricted geographical area and to try to define the network of topological relations between types. The representation space is the experimentation place on the urban scale also. Through the study of the calvary position in relation to the ancient urban centre or to the other religious buildings and through the reconstruction of the perceptive links between the places, it is desired to read the connection between the rite and the urban structure. It, still today, considers the calvaries as nodal points despite the settlement transformations.