A different kind of modernity. South Mediterranean Gardens and Urban Landscapes

In the 19th century, landscape and garden design of the Mediterranean regions has progressed from a strong relationship with history of places and territorial structure, where plans for gardens, parks and public areas were designed within the ordained limits of the urban configuration and the local landscape culture, towards a more inter-cultural approach to design. In the Southern Mediterranean regions this approach has shifted from an idea of public garden as hortus conclusus, walled or inscribed into urban grids, to an “open urban landscape”, often inspired to external influences. In some of these regions, the structural relationship between garden, landscape and urban layout, which was typical of the pre-modern city, survived into the modern urban planning, even if the cultural context, which was at the basis of the traditional idea of landscape, changed. This paper aims to discuss this shift of attitude toward landscape, between modernism and modernity, local approach and external influences, connection and caesura with the urban and territorial structure. In particular, cases analyzed will deal with the permanence of tradition into an apparent shifted approach to the landscape. This different kind of modernity will be read into the gardens, public spaces and waterfronts of three southern Italian and Libyan study cases: Bari, Taranto, and Tripoli.