Everyday differences in Puglia: Threshing Floors

Puglia Differences: an occasional series on things that strike this Brit as so very Italian.

Scattered around the countryside you can see round flat stone areas surrounded by a low walls some 30 cm high. These are threshing floors (Italian: Aia). They are used for, literally, separating the wheat from the chaff.

Before mechanical threshing machines were invented, this is how the grains were separated from the stalks. An ancient farming technique that goes back millennia and is even mentioned in the Bible. The first biblical mention of the threshing floor is in Genesis 50:10. [Wikipedia].

These three examples are all from the countryside around Cisternino, but I have seen several others in my travels around the area.

There is even a local hotel (now closed) called “Aia del Vento” - Aia of the wind - named after this feature. The farmers would toss the wheat up into the air, the grain would fall to the ground and the wind would blow away the chaff. It doesn’t get much more mediaeval than that!