The project for the “Galleria Oretea” by Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda and other unbuilt “passages” in Palermo

Abstract

The contribution aims to conjecturally reconstruct and analyze the unrealized project by Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda regarding the “Galleria Oretea” for Palermo. It is an urban project of considerable size and impact, which should have provided the city of Palermo, in the old town, with a gallery in the style of the Parisian “passages”, inspired by the contemporary creations of Milan and Naples. Thanks to the recent cataloging and publication of the entire corpus of drawings in the Damiani Archive, a reinterpretation of the project was carried out through a three-dimensional recomposition of the immersed in the places where it was originally conceived. Two other projects were developed for the area, different in terms of layout and concept, signed by Francesco Paolo Rivas and Michele Utveggio. The project that was carried out, less ambitious and smaller in size, was drawn up by Paolo Bonci for the contextual restoration of the ancient district of the Tannery. The work then proceeded to open further windows of comparison with the projects subsequent to that of Damiani, which also remained unrealized, until the actual construction of the “Galleria delle Vittorie” on via Napoli.