The market roads in the historical centre of Palermo: environmental values and some considerations on their safeguard

Ref.: 216
Área temática: 03 Integridad visual de los paisajes urbanos históricos
Fecha de recepción: 15/11/2008

AUTORES (* Autor principal)

GIRGENTI, Gian Marco * (Italia) - University of Palermo
LIGGIO, Giovanna (Italia) - University of Palermo

ABSTRACT

The place of the urban market has a particolar role in the drawing and in the shape of historical city texture. The contemporary town seems to undergo a new polarity of waves and routes with the advent of "malls" and with the influence of new supermarket transformation in real "market-towns": this process can turn barycentres and way of fruition of routes. In Palermo such phoenomenon risks to compromise the surviving of historical markets, which still showed a fairly good state till some time ago, notwithstanding the decay of the next buildings.
The recent recovery operations of Palermo Historical Centre consider more and more the hypothesis of an "environmental" restoration: they start from the material restoration of buildings and they link their surviving to a harmonic connection to its context.
The study recognizes the distinguishing items typical of the islamic Medina in road systems and in the urban structure of the Sicilian capital; they, even if they were tranformed by the interventions which were made after the culture of the ideal city of the Renaissance, have conditioned its development and growing, leaving the trace of a cultural heritage which today is probably forgotten, but which can be found in its identity.
Then the study gives attention to the market road and to its main elements, starting from the close connection with the activity carried on there (which determines not only the geographic localization related to the centre or to the surroundings of the established urban hierarchies, but also to the history of its displacements and modifications); then to the architectural typologies present in it (strongly characterized by the presence of a trade corporation) and the quality of the born urban space, where the fixity of architectonic monuments faces the very vital mutability of human presence and of fleeting architectures (stalls and awnings).
The street wall screen is attacked with an extraordinary vitality and without a particular obbedience to aesthetic rules or urban laws, and the shop space falls on the public space spontaneously and overbearingly. Sometimes the bench is in the middle of the road to be dismounted later in the evening : in this way the space along the hours of the day becomes flexible and changeable.
The image of the medieval "arabic/mediterranean" city, based on exact structural hierarchies and connecting lines, expresses a dynamism and a vitality arranged in different ways, surely escaping the drawing control, intended as a tool of balance and check of various sectors or quarters, but not left to the case or to some laws of spontaneous aggregation.
Our attention is focused on the main road of the historical market of the "Vucciria", which presently is in a terrible situation of decay: in this case the environmental value consists in the amount of the local architectural emergencies and the still existing commercial and handcraft activities, which have given birth and development to the same street. The former are stricly connected to the latter: the re-use of the ancient buildings without a safeguard plan of the commercial activities would cause the lose of the urban quality there expressed.

BIBLIOGRAFÍA