Each room was originally a real home in which a whole family use to live in: adults, children and animals.
Thanks to a careful restoration project we were able to maintain the characteristics and peculiarities of the places. Each room turns out to be different from the other.
“The peasants houses were all alike, consisting of only one room that served as a kitchen, bedroom, and usually as quarters for the barnyard animals as well…
On one side of the room was the stove; sticks brought In every day from the fields served as fuel, and the walls and ceiling were blackened with smoke. The only light was that from the door. The room was almost entirely filled by an enormous bed, much larger than an ordinary double bed; in it slept the whole family, father, mother, and children. The smallest children, before they were weaned, that is until they were three or four years old, were kept in little reed cradles or baskets hung from the ceiling just above the bed.
When the mother wanted to nurse them she did not have to get out of bed; she simply reached out and pulled the baby down to her breast, then put Mm back and with one motion of her hand made the basket rock like a pendulum until he had ceased to cry.
Under the bed slept the animals, and so the room was divided into three layers: animals on the floor, people in the bed, and infants in the air.”Carlo Levi – Christ Stopped at Eboli