L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 18 L'Italo-Americano S een from the road that climbs out of t h e p o r t , t h e w h i t e d o m e s scattered across Pantelleria, the dammu- si, look like decoration laid over a black island, the one bright thing in a landscape of lava stone and wind-flattened scrub. Their dome is a catchment before it is anything else, s i n c e r a i n f a l l i n g o n t h a t curved white surface runs down a channel cut into the roof, the cannalata, then into an underground cistern: for most of the island's history that was the entire water sup- ply of the household beneath it. Pantelleria has no rivers and no springs, and the peo- ple who settled it worked out that if the sky was going to be the only source for water, the house had better be shaped to collect from it. The island sits in the mid- dle of the channel between Sicily and Africa, thirty-two square miles of volcano rising to 2,743 feet at Montagna G r a n d e , s o m e s i x t y - s i x miles from the Sicilian coast a n d o n l y f o r t y - t w o f r o m Tunisia. It is a good deal clos- er to Africa than to Italy, and i t h a s b e e n t h o r o u g h l y African at several points in its h i s t o r y : t h e A r a b s t o o k i t around 700 and held it until Roger II arrived in 1123, and enough of that period sur- vives in place names and the dialect to be obvious to a visi- tor. The name itself comes down through the Sicilian Pantiddirìa, itself from the Arabic Bint al-Riyāḥ, daugh- ter of the winds, a name that anyone who has tried to eat l u n c h o u t d o o r s t h e r e w i l l accept as fair reporting. Dammuso itself means "vault" in the local dialect, from the Arabic dammūs by way of the Latin domus. The vault is the point of the build- ing. But what is, exactly, a dammuso? It is a cube of dry stone with a dome on top, put together without mortar: two skins of volcanic rock with the gap between them packed with gravel and rubble, the whole wall running up to six and a half feet thick, and bet- ter than six feet of it around the doorway, where arched r e c e s s e s a r e s e t i n t o t h e masonry to carry the weight of the dome. None of this was done to please the eye: walls that thick hold the night's coolness through the after- noon and give the wind noth- ing to work on, and the stone w a s t h e o n e m a t e r i a l t h e island had in surplus, cleared off the fields by hand before anything could be planted in them. R o o f i n g a d a m m u s o wasn't necessarily simple: over the load-bearing stone of the vault went a layer of earth, then volcanic lapilli for i n s u l a t i o n , a n d f i n a l l y a waterproof skin of lime, tuff and pounded pumice com- pressed to about an inch and a half, whitewashed on top to reflect the sun and show up any crack. Below ground, the cisterns were built square or rectangular and held some- thing on the order of eight to ten thousand gallons apiece; archaeologists have counted them across the island in the t h o u s a n d s , b u r i e d u n d e r courtyards and vineyards long after the houses they served fell in. Inside, a dammuso is dark by design, its main room lit by a single window of about sixteen inches by twenty. On the exposed slopes, the open- ings were all put on one side, the other walls left blank a g a i n s t t h e w i n d . O f f t h e main room ran a camerino, a small chamber for the chil- dren, and an alcova screened by a curtain. The cooking and most of the living happened in the one space under the vault, where a family could sit out an August afternoon in a temperature the outside of the building had no say in. Beside the house, built according to the same practi- cal manner, stood the fami- ly's way of growing food. The giardino pantesco is a cir- cular enclosure of dry-stone walls, high and windowless, with a single narrow doorway and small openings at the b a s e t o a d m i t r a i n w a t e r . Inside, there is usually just one tree; the giardino pante- sco restored by the Donnafu- gata family and donated to the Fondo Ambiente Ita- l i a n o i n 2 0 0 8 m e a s u r e s about thirty-six feet across and thirteen feet high, and shelters a single orange tree of the old Portogallo variety. Its effectiveness depends on condensation: the porous l a v a s t o n e c o o l s s h a r p l y between afternoon and dawn, causing moisture to collect on the inner walls and run down toward the roots. The idea of a wall acting as a rain-free irrigation system may sound odd, but inside the enclosure the air is noticeably cooler and stiller than in the open field just a few feet away. V i n e s w e r e p r o t e c t e d from Pantelleria's harsh con- ditions in almost the opposite way, thanks to the alberello pantesco, which is planted i n a h o l l o w d u g i n t o t h e ground, so that the vine sits below the strongest winds. Its stem is pruned into six low, spreading branches, while the hollow is reshaped by hand each year to preserve t h e r i g h t m i c r o c l i m a t e around the plant. UNESCO a d d e d t h e p r a c t i c e t o i t s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014, noting that the knowl- edge was still held by around five thousand islanders and passed down through dialect and practical demonstration rather than written instruc- tions. The grape is Zibibbo, used to make passito, while the capers growing from the same volcanic landscape have their own IGP protection. T h e i r b u d s a r e p i c k e d b y hand from late May to Sep- tember, with the same plants r e v i s i t e d e v e r y f i v e d a y s , before the capers are salted i n w o o d e n b a r r e l s i n t w o stages over roughly three weeks. The dammusi themselves are thought to date back to around the tenth century, under the Zirids, when they were first built as shelters for men working in the vineyards and only later became per- m a n e n t h o m e s . I n m o r e recent decades, however, that process has partly reversed. S i n c e P a n t e l l e r i a b e c a m e Sicily's first national park in 2016 – and even before then – many dammusi have been bought and restored as sum- m e r h o u s e s , w h i c h h a s helped preserve a large num- ber of them, although some r e s t o r a t i o n s r e t a i n t h e appearance of the original buildings while losing the practical idea behind their design. The best-preserved exam- ples still function much as they always did, with their vaulted roof helping keep out t h e h e a t , a n d t h e w h i t e - washed surface still needing t o b e r e c o a t e d w i t h l i m e before the winter rains arrive. FRANCESCA BEZZONE T h e D a m m u s i o f P a n t e l l e r i a : h o u s e s built to catch the rain Traditional dammusi rise from Pantelleria's volcanic landscape, their thick stone walls and white domed roofs designed to collect rainwater and protect the interior from the island's heat and wind (Image generated using Adobe Illustrator AI) LA VITA ITALIANA TRADIZIONI STORIA CULTURA

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