Revenant architecture: the values and significance of reused elements in the reconstruction of Sicilian cities (17th-18th century)

Abstract

The history of Sicily in the modern age has been marked by numerous, traumatic natural disasters (mostly earthquakes) which have strongly marked the collective memory. These events have constituted real caesuras in the history of architecture, since they have offered occasions for the modernization of the building heritage; they also stimulated the renewal of architectural languages and techniques, the latter also in an anti-seismic key. However, even if the combination of catastrophe and reconstruction is synonymous with change, the practice of reusing architectural elements and building materials always represented a sign of continuity, even in cases where the reconstruction was radical. The underlying reasons are as much of a practical and economic nature (linked to the exploitation of the rubble as quarries, where materials ready for the construction site could be extract) as of a symbolic nature. The reassembly of valuable elements, such as portals, windows, balcony shelves, on the facades of churches and palaces has both an aesthetic and an evocative function, maintaining the link with the lost buildings. The same can be said for those construction sites which were anchored to the surviving portions of ancient factories, keeping their historical prestige alive: this happened, for example, with the apses survived to collapsed churches, which stimulated reflections on the resistance of the circular structures to earthquakes. Starting from cases related to the seismic events that shoked the Val di Noto and Val Demone territories, the aim of this study is to consult the symbolic meanings and values attributed to survival architectural elements by the communities, intent on perpetrating and renewing their own historical memory also in the reconstructed architecture.