Il terreno comune. Archeologia, architettura e città nella Pozzuoli alta

The myriad of relationships that architecture has engaged with archaeology over the last two centuries were limited to reworking the materials of history. This became an end unto itself that was unable to value and honour the relics of the past, demonstrating just what a contradictory and ambiguous recourse for history they can be, even in front of the archaeological discipline evolution and its investigative methods and researches. This was clearly understood from both quantitative and qualitative points of view. Archaeology and architecture have walled themselves off within their respective disciplinary confines, incapable of making archaeological heritage part of our daily lives. A ruin should not be seen merely as an isolated element tied to a single epoch, but rather as a process of relationships uninterrupted over time, located in a specific place within a city and its history in relation to a specific community, also open to recognition by and sharing with other cultural realities. The need to define a more “fertile” relationship among archaeology, architecture and cities emerges immediately when facing the history and present conditions of Pozzuoli in the western territory of Naples. These places are located within a natural landscape of unusual character and beauty. They have been so violated by the modern and contemporary built context that their very perception has been, in some parts, compromised. The remains of large monuments – unique works of architecture and spaces dense of history – have been mortified, reduced to isolated fragments scattered about a uniform and banal urban fabric. The subject of our research was the upper Pozzuoli, the part of the city that developed around the important archaeological sites of the Flavian Amphitheatre and the Temple of Neptune extending to the ancient nucleus of Rione Terra. Today it is a consolidated city whose compactly built urban fabric appears totally indifferent to ancient Pozzuoli’s urban logic. Public space has become a vague set of ill-defined voids unfit to accommodate human life. Interspersed within these voids, archaeological ruins are unable to exercise their potential role both as monuments as well as “magnets” supporting urban life. In our design research, archaeology became a necessary constraint: an immanent pretext for a unitary and clear project that could closely interweave physical, cultural, anthropological and social concerns. Our project consists of a public pathway system structured around five archaeological sites in the upper Pozzuoli: the temple of Neptune, the Flavian Amphitheatre, the Villa Avellino with its cisterns, the College of Tibici and the Rione Terra. Starting from knowledge of these sites, their contexts, their physical and material forms and the interpretation of their atmospheres and qualities we developed an urban strategy that can promote a series of minimal actions to catalyse the redevelopment and regeneration of Pozzuoli’s upper city.