Avezzano rinasce. Ville, villini e palazzine protagonisti di una nuova identità urbana.

The housing of the first decades of the twentieth century in the small towns of the Italian province does not include, in general, relevant architectural episodes, only proposing repetitive types (villas, villini and palazzine), enriched by facades with architectural and decorative elements taken from an historicist language (liberty, neoclassical, neo-medieval). In the reconstruction of Avezzano after the dreadful earthquake of 13 January 1915, however, the housing built both by the Unione Edilizia Nazionale and by some wealthy families and local professionals, assumed a particularly important role, also in view of specific planning and construction conditions in one stage of almost all new urban core. The identity of the modern Avezzano, therefore, apparently “provisional, lacking a centre, with its straight streets, all the same, and the orderly and long rows of houses, all the same also these (...)” (Mafai 2012) is linked to its orthogonal street grid and the orderly sequence of “houses”. However, after a research and a closer look, villas, villini and palazzine built along the fronts of all axes and urban spaces structuring the new settlement did not appear “all the same”, but characterized by architectural elements and decorative features, mainly, from the Art Nouveau, neoclassical or neo-medieval language. These elements were the same of those adopted in residential housing of the major Italian cities (Rome, Naples, Milan), as since the early twentieth century the theme of the “modern” house started to be faced in its typological and language variants, just in order to define some villas, villini and palazzine model-types to be used in the extensive urbanization projects that, between the ninth and tenth centuries, were affecting all European and Italian cities. Precisely because of the typological, architectural and constructive repetitiveness, that housing production was the subject, in general, of a negative preconception, that impeded its conservation. For Avezzano, almost entirely reborn after 1915, thanks to these “standardized” villas, villini and palazzine, is particularly important to remove such bias through the knowledge of the real urban and historical-architectural meaning of the buildings, before losing again the identity of the town rebuilt 100 years ago.