The drawings of the soil. Allographies of a denied report, between permanencies and overlapping of settlement traces

The convergence of two singular factors, such as the significant passenger traffic in the port of Naples and the proximity between the historical centre and the port itself, offers to the waterfront of the city a potential capacity of integration, that even from one perceptive reading, is still unexpressed in a exclusively topographic contiguity between land and sea. The progressive disarticulation process started with the physical increase of the distance between the port system and the city in the nineteenth century confirms currently an immovable sense of separation, not only perceptive, between the two entities, which appear as relegated in a mutual inability to interpenetrate to transmit pulses and powers, economic and cultural resources, mutual strengthening to regenerate the urban identity. An analogous connective insufficiency is experiential in the reading of the relations between the properly urban parties localized along the strip of the monumental port. A detailed examination conducted on the area of Mercato finds that as one of the urban shares with higher density of ancient settlements traces next to the sea and the port. The multiplicity of changes in the coastline and in the shape of the port is conjugated, over time, with a complex network of the urban settlement which, between the alternation of historical overlays and strain of newest urban errors, struggled to adapt to the changes that act on its structure, dispersing its connective and original identity. The separation between the town and the port system, as the discontinuity between more or less contiguous parts of the city, determines the incoherence of the overall system as unicum. Starting from the design of the ground, the discontinuity is identified through a kind of allographic impression who transcribes the signs. Revealing areas of urban connectivity can be considered the same as those of change. In the face of the few in which the tracings are integrated almost topologically, allowing the balance of relations, it dominate those where tissues and planes of arrangement of the various textures touch themselves without intersecting or interrelating each other, highlighting connective insufficiency.