Ischia. Linee di Ricostruzione/Recontructions lines

The earthquake of the summer 2017 brought the island back into the spotlight for its consistency as an active volcano, revealing the high degree of risk. The natural event is part of the cyclical history of Ischia. Its volcanic nature conditioned the historical and settlement events with periods of extraordinary attractiveness alternated with others of inevitable repulsion. Since the Neolithic period, the fertility of the soil and the richness of the waters constituted the prerequisite for the foundation of inhabited centers; eruptions and landslides caused its disappearance or abandonment, constituting at the same time the basis for subsequent foundations. The recent seismic phenomenon has shown the careless for the building activity in the last decades. Beyond the contingent emergency it represents an opportunity for reconstructing and for creating the opportunity to re-establish the identity of the island starting from its specific characteristics which have been forgotten or subordinated to short-sighted market logics too often. Water, constituting the most representative resource of the geography and history of the island, is taken as the main reading key to prepare a ‘re-foundation map’. In this frame, architectures and thermal landscapes, exotic gardens, rural villages and noble villas, constitute the useful signs to outline a scaffolding of action in which the imaginaries produced by the pictorial, cinematographic and ceramic arts will converge as an instrument of comparison and verification.