This series of photos by Attilio Bixio document a part of the rural history of Italy in the middle of the last century.

Or rather they document what remains.

But in themselves they are a sociological study of needs that are still current today.

Probably the ambition of the project has been frustrated for multiple reasons but the final result can serve as a guide on how to face these same problems today.

“Utopia is a long-term project, still in progress.

The idea is to investigate a vast territory in Basilicata, where in the 50s of the twentieth century a great agrarian reform was carried out, to assign land to workers who did not own it.

With this reform, many farmhouses were built throughout the territory, and some rural villages were also built, designed to be almost self-sufficient.

Some of them, such as Borgo Taccone, had a school, a cinema, a church, a post office, a police station, a small prison, a clinic and even a railway station.

It was a great social utopia, but in a few years the small farmhouses were almost all abandoned, and today the area is an immense expanse of wheat fields, with a few isolated houses here and there; often there are no longer even the roads to reach them.

However, they appear as if they have always been part of the place, giving life to a harmonious landscape, in which few signs of human activity can be seen: ploughed fields, a few abandoned houses, a solitary tree, the sky.

The rural villages themselves are now almost abandoned or in ruins, inhabited by very few people.”