Festival dell'architettura

STAGE SETS OF THE URBAN PROJECT

Urban theatrality, Our Via Emilia, The compact city, Post-emergency earthquake

OUR VIA EMILIA

Reflections on the main monument of the Emilia Romagna Region.

Over two centuries from the foundation of the route of the road that simultaneously with the web of centuriation was to define the formal, as well as economic, settlement and socio-cultural matrix of the context of the Emilia Romagna Region, a major work of territorial architecture, according to the definition of Lucio Gambi, appears a due tribute in terms of reflections and scientific evidence concerning this extraordinary historic thoroughfare. A poleogenetic road, capable of generating an in-line polycentric system that over the centuries has consolidated a range of settlements where peculiarity, autonomy, common character and complementarity are a natural collaborative vocation, even if often today more in potential terms than in the reality of the facts.

Paying tribute therefore means reflecting on the substance of what, in this case, is a consular road that for its own original features but especially for its endurance over long historical times, to evoke Braudel, maintains a structural role reiterated by the induced parallel infrastructure developments ‒ rail, road and today the High Speed railway line ‒ as directional imprinting, shaping the entire structure of the regional space. In the space between city and countryside, today increasingly in crisis because of opportunistic conurbation processes, we must first rediscover the attribution of meaning, and therefore of value, that the Via Emilia is capable of transmitting in crossing the places. In this sense, in addition to its primogenial role, we cannot help but nominate it "main monument of the Emilia Romagna Region" where etymologically, memini invites us to memory, to what we cannot forget, that concerns us, and moneo for the teaching that comes out of it and may still exist through substantiating transformations between architecture and landscape.