centro storico, di pianura, Mileto, Militu (denominazione idiomatica)

Mileto’s present-day centro storico is a Baroque-era grid, laid flat on the plain after the earthquake of 1783 erased the Norman hill-town entirely. The old site, three kilometres away, was abandoned; the new one was built on the bishop’s villa estate, free of prior structures. Royal engineers Winspeare and La Vega, with the architect Ferraresi, drew up a rectangular plan, 360 by 550 metres, with fifty blocks of varying sizes. A grand central piazza was intended for special markets, with four smaller squares at the corners for daily trade, each to host a parish church.

The orthogonal grid remains, lined with late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century terraced houses and linear blocks, modest, but notable as unified architectural compositions. Yet the 1791 earthquake, a mere eight years later, damaged nearly every building, despite their ‘baraccato’ anti-seismic construction and low profiles. Only the mills stood firm. The seminary suffered badly. A town rebuilt twice before it was properly settled; the grid endures, but the tremors left their mark.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.