Memorie dal sottosuolo. L’atto dello scavo dalla conoscenza archeologica alla rappresentazione dei caratteri della città stratificata mediterranea

A remote origin and a long continuity of life characterize many of Italian and Mediterranean cities, in a so often incisive way as to give their very form a peculiar complexity. Their form, as the result of many morphological interpretation expressed during the time, is attributable to a multiple and dialectical paradigm, revealing one of its fundamental characters: stratification. If it is true that a precious part of the knowledge of the stratification of our cities comes to us from subsoil, some design reflections could be concentrated already on it. For archaeological traces to be transformed first into documents and then into monuments, that is, into forms capable of expressing knowledge and memory, it is necessary that a project idea would be outlined starting from a series of questions inherent to the very form of the soil and its transformation. From this point of view, some experiences developed during modernity in a specific geographical and cultural context such as the Roman one are exemplary: Giuseppe Valadier project for Trajan’s Column Square and Francesco Cellini’s project for the redevelopment of the Mausoleum of Augustus and Emperor Augustus Square show how much the act of excavation, in its cognitive and transformative dimension, has the capacity to attribute and express as a value the stratification of our cities, and how much, finally, this line of research is still open and available for fruitful interpretations.