Vie e piazze dell’Aquila tra storia, resilienza e reinvenzione

The system of ‘voids’, squares and streets constitutes an irreversible imprinting of the form urbis of L’Aquila, an expression of the specificity of its founding process. The geometry of the chessboard that underlies it – an autocratic expression regulating design that finds its metaphorical and representative synthesis in the Fonticulano plan – has, over the centuries, preserved its connective role between the productive and social choralities, participants and protagonists of the urban life of the squares, of individual locali to public ones. This is a system that, over the centuries, has highlighted the ability to adapt and resilience to reconstructions and transformations resulting from the repetition of destructive earthquakes. The post-unification transformations of the city, which became the capital of the Abruzzo region, and their consolidation in the first half of the twentieth century strengthened the North-South axis, Corso Federico II and Vittorio Emanuele II, assigning it a financial and dynamic character through the presence of banks and public administration buildings arranged along the new arcades, the seal of the bourgeois value of this promenade, place of public recognition of social belonging. More than a decade after the earthquake, L’Aquila is progressively re-appropriating its poles of aggregation, within a context marked by profound socio-economic changes and ‘suspended’ from the epidemic of Covid-19, the latest recent social trauma whose impact on urban form and community rituals is difficult to assess. Nonetheless, programmatic strategies and spontaneous processes are reviving and recomposing the squares and streets of the city, recovering the buildings and the monumental context that characterizes them, giving the city its specific identity, including cultural, administrative, scientific, religious, recreational, leisure and buildings dedicated to entertainment. This is a process where resilience and reinvention must recover the material as well as the immaterial, both individual and collective senses of the city community: the coagulating force that has held the city together since its foundation. The text is related to the entries (by Patrizia Montuori) that follow and that highlight the transformations of the last two centuries and those in progress, including: Castle Gardens and Auditorium. Piazza Santa Maria Paganica. Corso Vittorio Emanuele II and Federico II. Piazza Duomo. Palazzo dell’Emiciclo and Villa Comunale. Corso Principe Umberto e Piazza Palazzo. Basilica di San Bernardino da Siena and the scalea.