After the Earthquake: The ‘Interrupted’ Landscapes

The seismic event that hit Central Italy in 2016 was exceptional, due to the total mix of architecture and context. A historical building heritage that, like all minor urban contexts, suffers from its own fragility, attributable to a poor propensity to assign to it a specific ‘monumental’ character; a weakness that puts at risk the conservation of a value that is identity-related even before being historical-architectural. Today the (unavoidable) question arises of the methods of reconstruction of this landscape: on the one hand there is the need to quickly repair the damage caused by an earthquake that has disconnected not only the structures but also the consciences and the very identity of the populations; on the other hand the need to reconstruct large portions of a historical fabric that has stratified over the centuries and is today characterized by ‘interrupted’ landscapes. The conception of the landscape dimension outlined by the European Landscape Convention eliminates, instead, the dualism between 'natural environment' and 'cultural environment' understood as a place of identity of values. The extension of the concept of monument to broader areas and dimensions poses new critical and interpretative problems relating to the 'sense of place' and consequently requires the adoption of appropriate intervention tools, connected to urban planning discipline and territorial planning methodologies, to be combined with those specific to restoration. In terms of urban memory, it will therefore be necessary to promote a reconstruction process, based on the repair, recovery and restoration of what was saved from the earthquake, preserving the pre-existing road and land structure and avoiding methods of complete demolition and subsequent reconstruction from scratch; the reconstruction-translation of minor historical nuclei and the consequent, contextual, cancellation of permanent signs would in fact definitively remove every trace of their evolutionary memory, generating 'non-places'.