Plot

"Solo Miseria e poi... e' Sempre Cosi'." (Only Poverty and then... it is Always Like That.) is a feature documentary about an abandoned village: Costalunga. In 1971, the author, Bruno Pischiutta, discovered a village that was abandoned by all habitants after the Second World War. The village was situated on a hill in Friuli (North Italy), 25 Km from Udine, and it was composed by about 25 houses that were still in reasonable condition. The only road giving access to the village had been built by the Italian army in 1968. The doors of the abandoned houses were locked. The village was surrounded by a beautiful landscape. Intrigued and curious to find out more about the history of the village and the stories of its long gone habitants, Bruno Pischiutta decided to unlock the doors of the houses and to explore their insides. What he found in those houses was incredible: between other things there were luggage filled with very old documents reporting the written history of the houses' owners and their families. In one of the houses, he found a child's school desk; he later discovered that he was standing inside the house of the village's teacher. All the houses had been built about 100 years before. Through interviews conducted with people in a nearby village named Faedis located about 9 Km from Costalunga and situated at the foot of the hill, the author discovered that the stones used for building the houses in the abandoned village had been brought up one by one from Faedis. The community that built Costalunga had lived there, in peace and harmony, for 70 years and then, after the Second World War, they all had to leave their houses and to emigrate to different parts of the world (Europe, Canada, the USA, etc.) just to survive.—Daria! magazine