Abandoned Cities. The “Solitude” of Anavatos

The paper deals with a current issue of our work: the reinterpretation and renovation of the urban form of abandoned settlements, endowed with architectural and landscape qualities, in view of their possible reuse simultaneously aimed at their protection and valorization. The reasoning is conducted from a point of view that considers the question of reuse, connected to the aspiration to reduce the occupation and overbuilding of our territories, as an extraordinary opportunity of “re-foundation” and reconfiguration of the form of city, according to its morphological and spatial structure, rather than only as a matter of methods and techniques of restoration and adaptation of its buildings and spaces to the new inhabiting needs as well as to new uses. In line with the Italian tradition of urban studies, this point of view is based on the centrality of form in architecture, namely on a morphological approach interested not so much to its figurative and stylistic aspects but rather to the syntactic “structure” underlying them. The settlement of Anavatos constitutes a paradigmatic case study for the virtuality of its “unfinished” form, available to be completed and re-interpreted, and for the potentialities linked to the extraordinary beauty of its territory, characterized and qualified by its suggestive presence.