Palmanova, conservation and metamorphosis

The case of Palmanova, a fortress town of the Venetian Republic is now a UNESCO site candidate in the category “Venetian defence works from the 15th to the 17th century”, along with Bergamo, Peschiera and Venice (cf. LEON A. F., LEON P. Palmanova e l’Unesco: il nesso tra sviluppo economico e politiche per la conservazione in F. P. Fiore, 2014). The project is not called upon to tackle a natural disaster, but the result of neglect from the ongoing decommissioning of the military buildings, which is depriving the town of its prime raison d'être, with the project plan as a tool to steer a necessary transformation in the passage towards post-modernity. The idea is to link the regional infrastructure project with an urban architectural project that will maintain and perfect the nine-sided ground plan with its triple rampart system, matched internally by a circular separation between the military scheme and the civil neighbourhoods, with «six piazzas never realized architecturally» (POLESELLO G., Venice Biennale 1985), and its central hexagonal piazza. In this way, the conservation of the works of the past must come to consider a different role for the town and its architecture. As Aldo Rossi said: «Palmanova's system of walls remains as a physical structure that has never been an urban dialect» (1970). Today, this extraordinary system must become the object of an informed metamorphosis in order to conserve it.