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About Pian del Tevere farmhouse History​

The Pian del Tevere farmhouse is on land register in 1727. It is a typical and suggestive example of the big umbrian farmhouse at external staircase, in the middle of a large and prosperous estate, lands reclamed in the sixteenth century from the Benedictines monks. This religious order (whose motto was ora et labora, pray and work, protagonist of the land reclamation works and of an agrarian culture in different parts of Western Europe) realised big houses, as that one, for more and more numerous families, because of broad hands need. The farmer  – Bartoccio is a character – is an head of a well organised farmer’s family, in which everyone contributes to produce wealth. At the beginning of the twentyth century, at Pian del Tevere resided a big family of twenty-four persons. The share-farming went out in 1965.

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Pian del Tevere’s recovery is a rare and exemplary philological restoration of an Umbrian ancient farmhouse, carefully aimed at preserving perfectly entire the old farmhouse’s shapes, texture and atmosphere. Each particular detail has been carefully cared to avoid falsifications: from the wall’s unevenness, the roofs slopes softness and the small eaves, until the smallest details.

Doorways and windows are the original ones, with their almost invisible sills. Materials have been chosen according to the local housing traditions, from the finding of stones to the river pebbles, to the pure lime mortars. The rooms are the same as they once were, with walling and wood fireplaces, and the hand made floor tiles.

Modern comfort, however, is carefully assured by the presence in the building of absolutely new technological installations, well hidden in order not to be intrusive, with a special care to conceal the novelties, to hide pipes and ducts and to leave intact the external image of the big tiles roof. 

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Il Bartoccio

 

Bartoccio from Pian del Tevere, the Perugia’s “maschera”

Bartoccio from Pian del Tevere is the Perugia’s carnival maschera, as Harlequin is the maschera of Venice and Punchinello of Naples.

Bartoccio is a farmer who tolks local country rough dialect, who goes up to the town and brings every thing back at the primary substance of food, sex, life and death. He’s the burlesque type of the well-off rude countryman , rogue but ignorant, sapid but coarse.

His stock-character comes from the “commedia dell’arte” and represents the mirror into the town is looking  at herself.

The maschera of Bartoccio comes from the seveteenth century and is the favourite reference of the dialect Perugia’s satirical literature.

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