Sea landscape and landing places in Palermo: the historical sea hamlet of Mondello

Ref.: 203
Área temática: 03 Integridad visual de los paisajes urbanos históricos
Fecha de recepción: 15/11/2008

AUTORES (* Autor principal)

CAMPANELLA, Giuliana * (Italia) - University of Palermo

ABSTRACT

Notwithstanding in old times Palermo could invest part of its richness in the very strict relation between land and sea, today it seems to deny such relations, either physical or functional or visual.
Palermo waterfront has been made far filling it with earth gradually: it has never been thought as a possible resource to be exploited, and today it is the great absent in the town landscape.
The sea seems to have its pregnant role in Mondello, which is a holiday suburb in the surroundings of Palermo. In ancient times it was a fisherman village; it was bought by a Italo-Dutch Society at the beginning of XIX century, in order to make some residential cottages for the emerging town bourgeoisie, with a good architecture planned by local authors.
Yet today Mondello has a lot of problems which have led the local administration to proclaim an international contest in 2006 in order to requalify it and to develop a possible solution of these themes.
We can say that the city can't yet be seen as a conservative museum for tourists and collectors: a city is not an antique shop or a restorer atelier, the projects can't be thought as activities aiming only to preservation; it is composed with people living their time with their own different changing languages. Citizens' future can't be mortgaged only restoring the past: it would mean to mortify the evolution possibilities.
On the other side the expressions of the will of modern art can't be the solution for all the interventions of riqualification; on the contrary it is necessary to suture the social textures that are flaking. This very area in summer periods of the year seems to be the pray of tourists, in others it finds again its vocation of seaman resort. Therefore it is necessary a planning which may keep its original identity which doesn't lead to a disaffection of places and then to a possible depopulation; the excessive trend to ride the wave of economic interests doesn't seem to have given results in the long run.
Then the aim will be to recognize and protect the fundamental values of a place, because they represent the memory, the tradition and the culture of our town and the ethical dimension on which our civilization is rooted and the places on which to build our future.
In my opinion there wasn't such aim in none of the plans that have been shown in the 2006 contest ; the old idea of the exploitation of the roads along the sea has never been adopted: it foresaw a landing-place system connecting the whole waterfront, as it happened in old times.

BIBLIOGRAFÍA

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