🍇 "Palmenti," the ancient winery of Pietragalla. 🍷

Italy has not only excellent grape juice, but also a wonderful wine-making architecture hidden under land like Palmenti in Pietragalla, Basilicata. 🇮🇹

Here is a group of ancient quartz sandstone buildings built semi-inlaid in a mound, rounded roofs covered with soil and grass, making it look like a "fairy-tale village" emerging from the earth. 🏠✨

The genius of the previous generation lies in its thick walls and semi-underground posturing, giving it a constant temperature inside, perfectly suitable for fermenting wine, with small vents to allow fermentation gases to flow out.

The interior is divided into multi-level basins.

🍇 Top Tub for Grape Pedals

🍇, the grape juice flows into the big tub below to start fermenting.

Some 🍇 also have a third tub for filtering and storing wine.

Once fermented, the wine is packed with wooden barrels and then furred with donkeys or horses to the rutte (rutte), a deep underground wine cellar used to curing it to a deep soft taste. 🍷

Palmenti was in use until the 1970s and today is preserved as Parco Urbano dei Palmenti, a major attraction and historical evidence of Italian wine making that has been passed down for centuries.