Torre Molfese

Torre Molfese is a historic building in San Brancato, a hamlet of Sant’Arcangelo in the province of Potenza. Formerly known as “Torre Mederico” after the area where it stands, it sits on a hill surrounded by olive groves and vineyards and is thought to have been a watchtower protecting travellers on their way to the nearby monastery of Santa Maria d’Orsoleo, less than one and a half kilometres away as the crow flies and reached by carrying on along the same road that leads to the tower.

History
The building is already mentioned in a parchment of 1616 kept at the State Archives of Potenza.
In the land register of 1742, held at the State Archives of Naples, it is listed among the assets of the adjoining chapel of Santa Maria della Croce, under the patronage of the Giocoli family of Sant’Arcangelo, who inherited it from the Lucarelli family. The 18th-century valuation describes it as an estate of farmland, partly uncultivated, with a chapel, a ruined ice house, a house called “la Torretta”, a cave and straw huts for the oxen, with many oak trees and a spring fountain known as Medrico.

In the 20th century the tower passed to members of the Molfese family of Sant’Arcangelo. From the 1980s, after it and the surrounding area had fallen into deep decay – partly because the Orsoleo monastery had closed – it was rebuilt from the remaining ruins, together with the small chapel of Santa Maria della Croce to which it once belonged.

Since its reopening in 1996, after the restoration, it has housed a collection of photographs of peasant life and is the seat of the Lucanian Regional Centre of the Academy of the History of Healthcare Art and of a Population Studies Centre working to improve the lives of older people in Basilicata.

The tower, now protected by the Superintendency for Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Basilicata, opens to the public occasionally for conferences and local events.

The building
The tower has a square plan and three floors, with walls of brick and stone on the ground floor and exposed brick on the upper floors.

Inside there was a simple fireplace and a staircase connecting the floors, as there is today. The tower and the whole settlement also had various outbuildings and services: caves and “catoggi”, underground rooms used as storerooms and animal shelters, a “nevera”, an ice house where snow was stored to preserve food, and above all water, which could be drawn from the nearby Mederico fountain.