Scritture in codice. Decorazioni berbere nella regione maghrebina.

The region located between the Southern Coast of the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara desert are the places where sedentary populations and nomadic tribes have found their point of contact over the centuries. These are the places where the nomads resisted the domination of populations coming from the North and, later, the Arab invasions Arabs coming from the East. Over time, Berber nomads settled in existing villages or founded new ones, at the gates of the desert and near wetlands and market places. The villages bordering the northern limit of the Sahara from Libya to Morocco are places of great contamination between Arab and Berber culture. The architecture becomes a text, which decoded, replicates the cultural and religious world, in which the different social communities identify. The decorations that appear on the architectures are repeated in aniconic geometric successions and are placed in drawn shapes from a vocabulary of local forms. In the alleys of the medinas and fortified citadels, on the perimeter walls and at the top of the watchtowers, inside the courtyards of the houses, the meaning of the decorations is linked to the symbolism of the desert, the oasis, the values of the communities and, of course, to religious values. The same patterns used on the wall are repeated in the carpets in which the drawing is presented in different chromatic variations. All the ornamental forms are the result of signs deriving from a deeply rooted culture, the Berber one, which claims its cultural values on the dominating populations.