Recovering “The Gods of the City”. A Project for Syracuse

The paper reflects on the relationship between transformation, memory and heritage through a project for Syracuse. The project con-cerns three distinct places and assumes three different scales: the first and most extensive place, the Epipoli plateau, geographically defined by the rocky leap on one side and sloping towards the sea on the other. Here the ancient city was built of which traces of the Dionysian walls garrisoned by the Euryalus castle can still be partially read; the site of the Neapolis with the ancient architectures that define the archaeological park, located at the foot of the Epipoli crag, between the plateau and the later urban expansions and in relationship at a distance to its original horizon towards the sea; the third area concerns the eastern edge of the island of Ortigia, for years occupied by the Talete parking lot, a formal break between the historic city and the sea. Three different areas in which the autonomous “pieces” of the project work in system according to common objectives: to make it possible to read the extension of the city, providing collective spaces and connecting the fragmented parts perceived as distinct and distant and to give new formal definition to some places built incongruously over time or left unfinished, recovering or specifying new constituent relationships with the sea and its landscape, the two elements that have always identified the city and its architecture. Not only common objectives but also a general mode of intervention that, discarding everything that clutters the visual field and prevents the possibility of understanding the city, interprets the traces of the ancient and the formal characters of the orography of the places and, as in an archaeological excavation operation, tries to enlighten its constituent reasons by proposing a new design, analytical and synthetic at the same time, that connects in a unified whole the scattered fragments as an opportunity – also for the design of the modern city – to rediscover, according to Italo Calvino, “the gods of the city”.