Pisticci

Pisticci sits on three eroded clay hills in the southern Matera province and is the most populous town in the province after Matera itself. The name of the coastal frazione, and the geology under the whole town, are the same clay that failed on 9 February 1688, when a landslide cut the settlement in half and killed four hundred people. Rather than move down to the valley, survivors rebuilt directly on the ground the slide had crossed, in two-room houses with pitched red tile roofs, arranged in straight lines instead of the tangled layout typical of hill towns in the region.

That district took the name of the cliff itself. Above it, on the highest point, the older part of the town kept its Norman tower, its medieval gate and its mother church, the built record of what stood before the collapse. Twenty kilometers away on the plain toward the sea, the hamlet of Marconia, named for Guglielmo Marconi, functions as the modern centre, while the coastal frazione handles the town's relationship to the Ionian.

The clay hills inland, meanwhile, are worked for truffles rather than housing. What the layout adds up to is a town split by elevation and by function: the old hill preserves what predates the disaster, the rebuilt district records the disaster itself, and the plain and the coast carry everything the eroding hill cannot.