Page 27 - traveling73 eng

VIAJES
The old family residences, many of which can be
visited today, reveal how life was organised in this
environment of canals. The successive courtyards
structured the house according to precise functions:
the first for receiving guests, the second for daily
tasks and the third as an intimate space. The dark
wooden beams, the fired-brick floors and the inner
ponds were not decorative elements, but practical
solutions for ventilation, storage and water collec-
tion, essential in a city built beside the river. De-
tails such as carved latticework, entrance stones
polished by use or small household altars explain
better than any museum what traditional life in the
delta was like: sober, functional and attentive to the
gestures that made an environment of water and
narrow passage habitable
A memory that remains
On leaving Tongli, the traveller carries with them the
impression of having been in a place that does not
seek to impress, but to accompany. Its beauty is
born of its ancestral past: the relationship with the
water, the continuity of the traditional houses, the
serenity of the Tuisi Garden and the unhurried pas-
sage of the boatmen
View of the pond and some of the buildings in the Tuisi Garden
One of the rooms for receiving guests
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