The architectural lexicon of the surfaces of the Post-Unification Italian cities

The research that is intended to show starts from the studies of the Polytechnic of Bari focused on the architectural lexicon of the post-unification building of the cities of the “Land of Bari”. The research immediately highlighted how the linguistic and formal choices of the architectural surfaces of the historic cities are inseparable from the national cultural context of reference. Furthermore, it should be highlighted that the architectures belonging to the period from the end of the eighteenth century to the Italian Unification are very emblematic of a desire to declare a sense of belonging of the client to a cultural and political area, choosing architectural forms and a formal language specific to a territory or a specific political power, sometimes even with more or less explicit extraterritorial references. In the post-unification period, this form of expression of belonging, by the owners and clients, acquires an even greater value, both in regionalist terms and in terms of political and cultural membership. It is needed to add, and often in an artfully instrumental way, the Risorgimental - post Illuministic approach of the desire to declare a form of " honesty of thearchitecture" in the manifestation of “true” materials in “true” construction techniques. This is a fair derivation of the Renaissance research well declined by artists such as Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Baldassarre Peruzzi (among others), but in the definition of the Umbertinian architectural program, could enters into conflict with the formulation of the "meaning" of the original architectural grapheme. It is precisely in this revision of the relationship between "material" and "meaning" of the architectural "grapheme" that the color takes on a distinctive role. In fact, the post-Illuminism desire to declare (through the colors) the honesty of the constituent material of the architectural surfaces entails the loss of the information that those elements of language assumed precisely through their chromatic "consistency" on the surfaces. To the theme of the relationship between "material" and "meaning" introduced by Paolo Marconi in the 1990s in the field of architectural restoration is linked the theme of the colors of architectural surfaces and the related identity meaning. Far from being exhausted today, it is linked too the today's issues of the recovery of non-preserved historic building surfaces, through public grant procedures, where these interventions does not have suitable safeguarding tools, neither in the administrative management of authorizations, nor in the guarantee of technical-scientific training of operators.