At the Books and Museum on April 6, 2025 at the monumental complex of Santa Maria la Nova in Naples the essay by Valeria Pezza: The invention of the house. The domestic order of the polis, Christian Marinotti editions, Milan 2025, 120 pages.
«Whoever lives in a house built inside a city is like a pilgrim who proceeds – as the nineteenth-century Russian mystic John of Kronstadt said – with a traveling staff and a wayfarer's clothing: when he reaches the end of his life, the door will open wide and he will finally be at home, "because we have no lasting city here, but we seek the one to come" (Hebrews 13, 14)» Review by Pasquale Giustiniani. The provocation that comes from the structure of the Greek city
Among the many thanks for this remarkable publication - created by Valeria Pezza with the contribution of DiARC: Department of Architecture-University of Naples Federico II -,((⏱️=400)) you can also read those that the Author wanted to dedicate «to the entire community of Pollica, a land where you can still see something of the Greek world». In fact, each of these rich and dense pages of Valeria Pezza's essay refers to the archaeological traces, or rather to their significant stones and their references to the thoughts and works of their creators, builders and inhabitants.
That of the houses of the Greek cities in the so-called colonies and in the sites of classical Greece, is a world similar to the one in front of which we can place, together, both archaeology and the history of architecture and topography; but also cultural anthropology and the history of ideas, as illustrated and demonstrated by the acute and erudite effort of deciphering, conducted for us by Valeria Pezza in these pages. Thus, the ancient stones of Akragas (Agrigento) can become the figure of an ambivalence typical of the complex and multifactorial process that is appropriately called "invention of the house". At a first, but superficial, glance, "the domestic dimension appears removed and devalued, as it is not based on the heroic gesture, on the public and visible exaltation of power, conflict and strength" (page 11). Instead, as we read in the Foreword to this volume (pages 7 to 18), the starting question should be formulated in accordance with what the title of the volume recalls (moreover enriched by numerous graphs and tables): "When was that repeatable and repeated house invented that presides over the construction of the city itself as a place not so much of religious, political, military power, but of the home of its citizens?" (page 7).
This explains why, integrating the consolidated point of view that correlated the architecture of the classical polis to the so-called political sphere, «it was urgent to question those forms, their meaning and their nature, to ask what domestic dimension, to what daily rituals they gave rise, measure and space, and in what vision of the world. Then, why so much silence? What meaning did the house have in that origin and what does the house mean for us today?» (page 9).
From here, a different and intriguing perspective takes shape, excellently pursued by Valeria Pezza, which helps to re-signify the very meaning of political action - theorized in the political writings of classical Greek philosophers - and to clarify in its various reverberations the relationship between the private (domestic), often relegated to the sphere of irrelevance, and the public (political, also in a military and warlike sense, but today also social and cultural): «Surprisingly, together with the question about the times and ways of the invention of the home for all, the disturbing one emerged about this incomprehensible condemnation to the insignificance» of the private, if understood only as "relegated to what is meaningless". This is why we must ask ourselves, continues the Author: «has it really always been like this? And now does it make sense for us to deprive of value the daily life that marks the life of each one, or is it precisely inside the home that a politics lives and can mature that is not reduced to the exercise and self-representation of power?» (page 10).
And furthermore: «So why this silence about the home? Why has that domestic world that originally defined the οἰκεῖος (oikèios) as an intimate, personal, familiar place, each person’s own space, ended up being qualified in common language only in the negative, as deprived of value and meaning, removed from awareness and thought?» (page 13). If, to the structural error, corresponds a previous error of thought, it could be examined, as the Author now helps us to do, through a further question: «If the personal is the first level of politics, why is it kept silent?» (page 14). Not a “den” or “place to take refuge: new meanings of the invention of the house((⏱️=500))
More than a den to take refuge in; more than an area or place without political-social relevance, the house, with its various classical reverberations of the words that designate it, «has a decisive role in the elaboration of the polis and the very idea of ​​politics» (page 15).((⏱️=400)) And this concerns not only yesterday, but also today and even the future, which above all has a proleptic charge that helps decipher the rubble of today: «The rubble of the bombed houses in Ukraine and Palestine are the image that best judges the war, showing its completely devastating and irrational character. The demolished walls, the torn houses, the intimate life desecrated and exposed to everyone's gaze perhaps recall, in the sign of the devastation, that hidden desire that questions the lived interiors of other people's houses, as in the opening scenes of Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, or in Hopper's paintings» (page 16).
These profiles, already well outlined in the Foreword, are then articulated and explained in the concrete unfolding of the four juicy chapters of this volume. In the first chapter (pages 19 to 42), which refers mainly to the analysis of the archaeological urban structures of the Greek foundation of Akragas (580 BC), it is observed that it remains difficult to immediately identify a rule for the arrangement of the blind walls and the typification of the house, until aerial photography offers another observation point to the general vision of contemplation: things truly unfold before the eyes, the forehead and the mind, as in a theater; whereby the city appears as a «spectacle and at the same time a religious ceremony in which things happen, processes develop» (page 22). In this way, it is explained why scholars have been able to conclude that Greek orthogonal urban planning was born outside of Greece. In fact, it is in the so-called colonies, before Greece, that the stones of the inhabited areas appear to have belonged to different city constructions; therefore, they can be made to “speak” – this is exactly what happens in these pages –: «a stable relationship between house and city is recorded, a sign that in these examples the polis was not identified, as in Greece, only with monuments and public places, but also included and built the house, the house for everyone; it gave place, form and measure even to that world dismissed as private. The unitary logic of the architectural and spatial system holds together the single part and the whole, the grandiose valley of the temples and the silent repeatable house, the public and the private» (page 33). Thus, the same square shape of the house takes on new reverberations, «then connected to the urban insula and the street layout», which will appear «not only in Sicily, but in various places in southern Italy, Epirus, present-day Turkey, the Chalkidiki peninsula, in foundations of the seventh, sixth, fifth and fourth centuries BC and even in Pompeii» (page 36). Sacred and symbolic profiles in the construction of the house. One of the first reverberations of this different, possible, look at the house, as shown in chapter 2. (pages 43 to 64), is the one that allows us to grasp the sacred profiles of the city's layout and the corresponding divinities: «To Hestia, first, each individual and daily turned their care and devotion; the rites of the hearth required that the sacred fire be kept always lit, pure and chaste, protected from events such as childbirth or death, from bloodshed and sexual intercourse. The Hearth was the main deity of the house, but other gods also inhabited different corners of the house and Zeus Herkeios, guardian of the border lines, dominated the entire building» (page 50). Indeed, not only outside the dedicated temple areas, but also in the kitchen, where people commonly live, there are gods: «There are gods here too, Heraclitus will say to some guests, standing on the threshold, who hesitated to enter his house seeing him warming himself by the kitchen fire. Impiety, the profanation of what is considered sacred, is one of the most serious crimes in ancient Greek culture, the one Socrates was accused of» (page 52). After all, «The square evokes stability, having equal angles and sides, and is a shape built on the correspondence to the four elements» (page 55). Here, on the episode of the obscure Heraclitus, is the testimony handed down to us by Aristotle: «And as Heraclitus, as it is said, spoke to those strangers who wanted to visit him, but who, once they entered, stopped in surprise to see him warming himself at the kitchen stove (he invited them to come in without hesitation: here too - he said - there are gods), so one must approach the investigation of each of the animals without disgust, since in all of them there is something natural and beautiful». As Martin Heidegger commented in Letter on Humanism (1946) -, the visitors thought they would find the obscure thinker «sunk in deep meditation»; instead, while he warms himself at the fire because he is cold, he pronounces the famous three words about the presence of the gods in the kitchen: words that put the thinker's...