Falco lanario
4 October 2019
Home Gorgoglione
8 October 2019
BOTTEGA BOREA
Historic building of Fardella
Categoria: MONUMENTAL HISTORICAL BUILDINGS
The Borea shop, dubbed “Vitino’s shop” by its owner, is a small building erected in the early 20th century by Giovanni Borea and located in the main square in Fardella. It then became a shop on the ground floor and an essential venue for the social and business life of the hamlet. It used to sell food, detergents, various goods, but also Marsala and Vermouth by the glass, like a current bar.
On the upper floor there was a small room with two beds and a sink, used as a guesthouse. Indeed, the owners had two more adjacent buildings with two more bedrooms, two bathrooms and a sort of restaurant serving the guesthouse. This was meant to provide accommodation to those passing by Fardella on the Regia road and then on the Sapri-Jonio road.
On the ground floor, next to the entrance door there is another small door behind which are small basins carved out of stone and used to leave dried salt cod to soak, to prevent it from smelling out the shop, with a ventilation system.
Covered with a double pitched roof with pantiles, it still looks as it appeared to the villagers in the past.
The small facade was painted around 1935-40 by a certain Dionigi Luigi from Chiaromonte: unique in its kind, it portrays very large and stocky ashlaring on the ground floor, which becomes smaller on the first floor and with angular rusticated ashlars. The absence of actual ashlars then led the artist to draw the shadows as well, in the attempt to make the picture look more realistic. Apparently, the author had in mind 15th-century Florentine ashlaring, characterised by ashlars that become smaller and better defined from the lower floors, used for storerooms and utilities, to the upper ones. There is a floral frame at the end on the first floor.
