Craco

The cliff rises above the Cavone valley, west of the Ionian plain, and the old village on top was abandoned in stages rather than all at once. Heavy autumn rains in 1963 set off a landslide that tore through the slope below and condemned several hundred buildings; the 1,800 residents were evacuated the following year to a planned settlement three kilometers down on the plain. A 1972 flood worsened the failure in the years that followed, and the earthquake of 1980 finished what the landslide had started.

Nothing has been rebuilt on the hilltop since. The two halves of Craco now sit in a fixed relationship: the ruined village above, empty and fenced into a walking route, and the resettled town below, where the population that once lived on the cliff has continued its life on the plain for six hundred people and counting. The abandonment was not a single event but three separate failures of the same ground, and the empty hilltop is what that slow, repeated collapse left standing.