The house of earth

The Marche region can boast important evidence of the ancient technique of walling with straw-mulched earth. Of this very ancient and fascinating architecture we find official references since the medieval and renaissance times, in municipal statutes, in cadastral maps, in place names and surnames. These buildings have modest dimensions, sometimes they only have the ground floor, and the dwelling is contiguous to the stables and the cellar, other times they have two floors, with a staircase that connects them. In this case the working rooms are on the lower floor and the living rooms are above. They are recognizable, even if plastered, because they have very small windows, the spur of the perimeter walls, the layout of the internal rooms is irregular and the rooms are narrow and low.
Clay and straw were used to build mud houses. Straw was joined to the earth and water, and one could beat with bare feet in a pit or make “raw” bricks. Another element that was widely used and found in quantity was cow dung, which to put it mildly was called “vile matter”. Together the two or three elements we obtained the “maltone”, very old term with which one indicates both the mortar and the construction technique. With the raw earth and straw were made maltons, also called masons which were nothing but large loaves of the weight of 7-8 kilos: by piling them one on the other, they made the earth wall, and with as much mortar, if there was a need, they tied each other. Arranged “knife” that is slightly inclined and in reverse direction layer by layer, a “fishbone” wall was obtained which gave more stability to the construction. Ostra Vetere has a tradition of land houses, very interesting and well documented since the seventeenth century. The house of land of Ostra Vetere, in contrada molino, today became one of the most visited houses of the northern brands, originally belonged to “To a certain Luigi Gregorini, direct farmer, who had built it around the years 1905 – 1910; it has then passed through various passages to the Perlini family, who lived there until 1957. The house has a rectangular plan and is spread over two floors, with a central partition that forms four distinct rooms: the kitchen and the barn on the ground floor and the bedrooms from the bed to the first. The two levels are connected by a modest wooden staircase close to the entrance. The walls’ vertical of the artifact are made in mortar of earth and straw, with external base in masonry of bricks slightly ‘to shoe’. The roof, a hut, rests on the perimeter strut-tu res and, in the central part, in correspondence with the partition, on a wooden distribution beam with a strut on the centerline that interrupts the ridge beam. The intermediate floor is made in currents and above planellato ‘dry’.
The house was purchased by the municipal administration of ostra Vetere, at the end of the eighties, The Museum was built in Florence in 1975 and has been restored by the Superintendent of Architectural and Environmental Heritage of Ancona. The building, appropriately signposted by road signs, is open to the public all year round and can be visited free of charge.