Historic Villages | Boomers Daily

Barnes played a role in everything from the invention of football to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Carla Passino takes a closer look.

Toby Keel – January 6, 2021

Until an army of 19th-century engineers descended on Barnes to build bridges and railways, this was a world apart, a rural idyll preserved intact by the Thames that bounds it on three sides.

Mentioned in the Domesday Book, the village had made history even earlier, when it was granted by King Æthelstan to the canons of St Paul in the 900s. The link between Barnes and St Paul’s persists more than 1,000 years on, as the Dean and Chapter owns one of the local gems: 122-acre Barnes Common.

Today, its woodland and acid grass-land are an oasis for hedgehogs, bats, butterflies and Nature-starved Londoners, but, for many centuries, they were home to grazing cattle. The livestock even became embroiled in a dispute between Barnes and neighbouring Putney in 1589, when ‘the men of Barnes refused to allow the men of Putney to use the Common and impounded their cattle,’ reports A History of the County of Surrey.

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The ‘Albergo Diffuso’ is a concept of hospitality that was launched in Italy as an attempt to revive small, historic villages at risk of abandonment and historic buildings at risk of crumbling.

A number of separate buildings make up an albergo diffuso, with a central unit corresponding to the reception within a 200-meter distance. They may feature rooms and apartments, with or without kitchen. There is also often a space for dining, and there may be other services and amenities as well, such as a pool.

Santo Stefano di Sessanio is a fortified medieval village built in the mountains of Abruzzo at over 1250 meters above sea level, within the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park.

The current urban configuration of the village was established in the middle of the Middle Ages when the phenomenon of fortification developed: high-altitude settlements, surrounded by a fortified wall perimeter that still remain today one of the most characteristic historical-topographical elements of the imaginary of the Italian landscape The integrity between territory and historical buildings has been residually preserved in some villages set in the Apennine mountains precisely because of their depopulation, in the more general context of impoverishment of the south, abandonment of the mountain and emigration of its people.

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