Il ruolo urbano dell’archeologia nella Pozzuoli alta: idee e scenari

During our study of Pozzuoli’s upper town, we identified five archaeological sites (Temple of Neptune, Flavian Amphitheatre, Villa Avellino and its cisterns, Collegium of the Tibicines, Rione Terra) and a street axis as elements that could characterize Pozzuoli’s urban fabric, its topographical conditions and environmental values as well as elicit a design-oriented vision of ancient artifacts in the contemporary city through which architecture and archaeology stimulate research and provide new answers to the fundamental question of urban continuity. Starting from the identification of a “common ground” for archaeology, architec-ture and cities, we tried to develop ideas, scenarios and ways to trigger and sustain urban regeneration actions. We sought to understand the features common to the city and its inhabitants, rediscovering, preserving, nurturing, and reinterpreting the cultural richness of these places and the quality of their physical form. The ruins helped us recover traces of the city’s different eras, providing us with a sophisticated and sensitive design tool whose rationale is based on perceivable evidence, to promote – with the help of memory and imagination – an order not imposed from the outside but from within the various archaeological sites and the city’s history, developing projects that take on meaning based on their specificity. The comprehensive design became a master plan for upper Pozzuoli. Our intent was to provide a useful tool to support further development, taking a position that was neither rigid nor prescriptive but as objective as possible so that the masterplan could become the basis for further projects: a vision that others might embrace and perpetuate. The street axis between via Campi Flegrei and the Rione Terra neighborhood, coin-ciding with the major axes of the Roman town and its later transformations, proved to be a permanent element in the city that could reveal a possibility for linking the ruins and their sites, connecting them to the city, despite its fragmentation and separation from the built fabric. We sought to conceive the street as a true landscape element that creates different relationships between the individual ruins, their contexts and the city, becoming at the same time a promoter and bond for diversity: a kind of canvas for urban life, a well-defined and appropriate means of recovering, interpreting and renewing the city’s spatial qualities and the relationships among the different contexts, easily ad-aptable to new forms and styles of living.