Cave in transizione. La trasformazione delle cave comprese tra il paesaggio montano e urbano di Palermo

Abstract

The Sicilian landscape has a long history of excavation and quarrying, of stone being removed and spaces left in limbo. In the province of Palermo, the calcarenite and marble quarries fuelled the city’s growth for decades, until, from the 1990s onwards, many were closed down and their spaces abandoned. Those cavities, born of the need to build, are today places suspended between absence and possibility. These are voids that can be interpreted no longer as lost margins but as new thresholds of the urban landscape. The disused quarries, including the Impiso and Troìa quarries, carved into Mount Capo Gallo, if reimagined, can restore continuity to the wider urban and territorial system and become architectures in their own right—public spaces that heal the wound whilst o ering a new way of inhabiting the mining memory and its legacy within the contemporary landscape.