A shelter for antiquity. An archaeological covering in Piazza Bellini in Naples

The city is made up of layers (strata) that are often invisible and difficult to understand, especially when there is no architecture to make them visible. This is the case of the 5th-4th century BC Greek walls in Piazza Bellini in Naples, which were discovered by chance in 1954 and left uncovered and inaccessible, covered and fenced off, unable to establish any clear relationship with the city “above”, which is organised according to a completely different order. The project, the result of a workshop-internship with young female students, aims to rearrange the entire Piazza Bellini, located on the edge of the Greek-Roman centre of the city, starting from the need to protect, but also and perhaps above all to “reveal”, the walls whose presence risks going unnoticed due to the e absence of a synthetic design that today sees the cleared space represented in the 18th century by Antonio Joli unnecessarily crowded with trees, monuments – first and foremost that to the Catania-born musician Vincenzo Bellini, who trained in Naples at the Collegio di Musica di San Sebastiano, now the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella, adjacent to the square – outdoor seating areas and street furniture. Once the excavation has been rationalised, a tall golden shelter reveals the rotated position of the walls, in the perforation and design of the paving, and finds its counterpoint in a portico that organises the outdoor spaces of bars, literary cafés and restaurants that “inhabit” the square, thus reintroducing the ruins into the urban dynamic and constructing a double register according to which the city reveals and does not pretend or conceal the millennial roots from which it originates. The golden yellow painted steel roof – ‘giallo Napoli’ – is intended as a shelter for the ancient, which, by echoing the alignments, heights and rhythms of the existing building facades, introduces a new urban singularity, called upon to characterize the public space, and, by sinking into the chthonic depths of the tuff, at the same time frees itself like a large pergola to signal the ancient remains it shades and protects. An abri souverain, as in Auguste Perret’s well-known definition, which in the accuracy of its proportions – a square in plan, two squares in elevation – and in the logical essentiality of its tectonic construction – four pairs of piers supporting two variable-section median beams, which in turn support a pergola trellis – has the task of implementing and staging – in opera et in scæna – the grandeur of the antiquity without mimicry but also without derision because, following Karl Kraus’s well-known aphorism, Ursprung ist das Ziel.