Another world is disappearing. The landscape of the city, as well as the whole Gulf of Taranto, seems to be almost inscrutable, always in search of a nostalgic connection, of an Odysseian nostos, desperately seeking an opportunity to forestall oblivion. In the same moment Argan speaks about cultural infamy, the IRI was filming a splendid documentary on the great landscape and geographic transformation and the new metallic topography that was about to replace the pages written by the ancient masserie. Walking down the streets, where the narrow alleys are coloured with the gold of the carparo, it is possible to understand how the vision of the building elements, recovered in the shapes of the endless shadows, emerge from the buildings themselves where, in the subsoil, hidden worlds are submerged. The Old City – or “Città vecchia” - in fact appears as a single block of stone which literally lies on the water, from whose bowels, only the necessary spaces for the lives of men were excavated from the rich and porous carparo as archeological frames. Just reconstructing the image of the ancient settlement, through the traces that are still legible, is truly complex. The current built configuration, fascinating for reasons both of sign and design, is the result of an uninterrupted and often haphazard superposing of urban interventions through which, in the continuous process of demolition and reconstruction, often using architectural remains of varied origin, many presences from the past were cancelled. The Byzantine rock substituted by the Aragonese Castle under the Temple of Poseidon, are some of the elements which oscillate between the absence and the presence of what once was there. An apparently exhausted city, in which the great architectural structures, which have been built in it, are suspended in time. Time that gazes, time that fixates. The constructive and architectural process has thus generated a fantastic landscape made of buildings within buildings, each one as a part of a preceding and forgotten ruin in which past layers are the foundations of the new. These words, at times poetic, however, have the will to return to investigate forgotten places in Southern Italy where environmental and social qualities are preserved in a timeless circle. It’s clear that in Taranto the archeological time is twofold, or sometimes triple in which this measure repeats itself in a sort of urban rhapsody capable of generating new hidden stanzas to look into as an architectural composition lesson.

Submerdeg worlds : Taranto: the image of the hidden Mediterranean Historical Center

Vincenzo Moschetti
2020-01-01

Abstract

Another world is disappearing. The landscape of the city, as well as the whole Gulf of Taranto, seems to be almost inscrutable, always in search of a nostalgic connection, of an Odysseian nostos, desperately seeking an opportunity to forestall oblivion. In the same moment Argan speaks about cultural infamy, the IRI was filming a splendid documentary on the great landscape and geographic transformation and the new metallic topography that was about to replace the pages written by the ancient masserie. Walking down the streets, where the narrow alleys are coloured with the gold of the carparo, it is possible to understand how the vision of the building elements, recovered in the shapes of the endless shadows, emerge from the buildings themselves where, in the subsoil, hidden worlds are submerged. The Old City – or “Città vecchia” - in fact appears as a single block of stone which literally lies on the water, from whose bowels, only the necessary spaces for the lives of men were excavated from the rich and porous carparo as archeological frames. Just reconstructing the image of the ancient settlement, through the traces that are still legible, is truly complex. The current built configuration, fascinating for reasons both of sign and design, is the result of an uninterrupted and often haphazard superposing of urban interventions through which, in the continuous process of demolition and reconstruction, often using architectural remains of varied origin, many presences from the past were cancelled. The Byzantine rock substituted by the Aragonese Castle under the Temple of Poseidon, are some of the elements which oscillate between the absence and the presence of what once was there. An apparently exhausted city, in which the great architectural structures, which have been built in it, are suspended in time. Time that gazes, time that fixates. The constructive and architectural process has thus generated a fantastic landscape made of buildings within buildings, each one as a part of a preceding and forgotten ruin in which past layers are the foundations of the new. These words, at times poetic, however, have the will to return to investigate forgotten places in Southern Italy where environmental and social qualities are preserved in a timeless circle. It’s clear that in Taranto the archeological time is twofold, or sometimes triple in which this measure repeats itself in a sort of urban rhapsody capable of generating new hidden stanzas to look into as an architectural composition lesson.
2020
9781716941436
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11578/284904
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