For 40 years, a Sicilian immigrant dug an underground California world, carving 65 rooms, tunnels, and fruit gardens beneath Fresno

Summers in California's Central Valley are no joke, and in the early 1900s, there was no AC unit to save you. According to the NationalRegister of Historic Places, the official U.S. government database of historic sites, one Fresno property has been recognized since 1977 for how one man solved that problem. He went underground for 40 years straight.

His name was Baldassare Forestiere, and more than a century after he began digging, what he left behind still stands, tucked away in a quiet Fresno neighbourhood.

A cellar that turned into a lifelong obsession
Forestiere was born July 8, 1879, in a small hamlet, Filari, near Rometta, on the northeast corner of Sicily. He immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s after a falling out with his father. He first spent time on the East Coast before purchasing land in Fresno, hoping to make a living growing citrus fruit. But there was one major problem. Most of the soil was hardpan, a thick, cement-like layer that citrus roots could not penetrate, and the summer heat made it almost unbearable to work the land.


So Forestiere dug himself a little cellar to cool off. He may have been inspired by Roman catacombs and Sicilian wine cellars he remembered from home. The Forestiere Historical Center, a family-run organization that documents his life and now runs the site, says he liked it so much that he kept at it, one room at a time, for the next four decades.

From one cool room to a 10-acre underground maze
What started as a hideout from the heat turned into an entire underground world. Using hand tools and a pair of mules to haul dirt, Forestiere carved out some 65 rooms on 10 acres without a single blueprint. His creation, “a unique complex of underground rooms, passages and gardens,” hand-carved out of hardpan, is listed by California's Office of Historic Preservation, the state agency that lists it as California Historical Landmark No. 916.

The finished space includes a summer bedroom, a winter bedroom, a bath, a working kitchen, a fishpond, and a parlour with a fire. It runs through three levels, 10 feet, 20 feet, and 23 feet deep. Forestiere deliberately built passageways of different widths so air pressure would push hot air out through the cone-shaped skylights while trapping cooler air below, creating a form of passive cooling decades before the term was widely used.

He grew fruit trees underground, and it actually worked
Here's the part that sounds made up but isn't. He grew fruit trees in his underground chambers and opened skylights to give them sunlight. Being underground protected the trees from winter frost, and Forestiere planted each level at different times so the trees would bloom in succession and extend the harvest season.

He also grafted multiple fruit varieties onto single trees, so that one tree could grow different fruits at the same time. The gardens still bear citrus, berries, kumquats, loquats and jujubes, some on trees more than a hundred years old. The vines planted over the underground rooms provide natural insulation, keeping the structure out of the sun.

A landmark most Americans have never heard of
Forestiere continued to add to his creation until he died on November 10, 1946. A little more than three decades later, on October 28, 1977, the site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and was officially registered as California Historical Landmark No. 916 on January 31, 1978. Today, the Forestiere family still offers guided tours through the tunnels and gardens, a piece of history most road-trippers speeding down Highway 99 have no idea exists beneath their feet.

The story even caught the eye of a novelist. T. Coraghessan Boyle wrote a fictionalized short story about Forestiere, "The Underground Gardens," published in The New Yorker in 1998. The real story, however, doesn't need any embellishment.

Why this story hits different for millennials right now
Just think about it. Here’s a man who built himself an off-grid, climate-controlled house decades before “sustainable living” was a hashtag, without a construction crew or power tools. Historians study places like this as examples of vernacular architecture, buildings constructed by everyday people to satisfy real needs, without formal training, according to a doctoral dissertation on Italian American immigrant spaces written by Teresa Fiore at the University of California, San Diego.

If you’re road-tripping through central California this summer, the Forestiere Underground Gardens show that the coolest places are not always built to impress. This one exists because one stubborn immigrant refused to sweat through another Fresno summer, and instead spent 40 years building himself an entire world underground.