Ruins preservation, transformation projects in the old town centre of Palermo. Lines of development and new perspectives

Abstract

The accumulation of data for an uninterrupted arc of some millennia has suffered a rest, due to the 1943 massive bombings during the last war, and to the damages inflicted to the old town centre: the continuity of the urban and cultural environment, where the buildings live their own history, got broken. The wartime events left “empty spaces” in the historical city, that weren't filled in the following decades, and the ruins which miraculously were still standing up became a memento not only of the wounds caused by World War II, who were still partially open, but also of the following vicissitudes, neglect, carelessness and lack of culture. In 1993, besides passing the P.P.E., the municipal administration started a culture-centred project of preservation-reuse in order to give back a vital function to the historical environment. In some cases of monumental factories, where there still were ruins that were caused by wartime events, an hypothesis of refunctionalization was carried out, by confirming the still existing “empty spaces” in order to transform them in a space of public spectacle under the open sky. This way the architectural work, being preserved in its tragic fragmentariness which becomes both a testimony and a warning, is given back its expressive and cultural dignity. This is the case of the area of “Palazzo Bonagia”, generated by the almost complete collapse of its architectural structure, of which the valuable monumental great staircase and the adjacent entrancehall only remained: these surviving elements were chosen as frons scenae for the new theatrical space. Or, again, of the church of “S.Maria dello Spasimo”, inexorably collapsed and never rebuilt, whose medieval naves, devoid of roofing, have been transformed today in theatrical stalls in the open air, with the stage situated in the apsidal basin. This way the architectural work, being preserved in its tragic fragmentariness which becomes both a testimony and a warning, is given back its expressive and cultural dignity. What I’am aiming at is a new figuration, which will succeed at being : for the preservation of its ancient elements, as a significant testimony of whole organism and as expressions of a ; and for the transformation of these ancient elements into a new complex with the insertion of modem-shaped parts, which meet the needs of a present functionality.