Risalite, antri e connessioni

Abstract

The fascination of the sensible experience of the site inspection inside the monastery of the Santissima Trinità delle Monache – now along interminable tunnels full of aulic spatiality and in the most hidden meanders of its undergrounds, full of echoes and shadows - has brought back memories and suggestions of readings distant in time, never dormant, about an “imaginative”and “underground” Naples. Among them, the narratives of Walter Benjamin, contained in his book Images of the towns, have been re-emerged, and that of the brief but intense article “Neapolitan underground: a critical survey”, written by Francesco Venezia and Gabriele Petrusch, whose text is accompanied by the photographic look of Mimmo Jodice. Descriptions and stories, these as other ones, able to capture the “physiological breath” of Naples, to give back its deep and true soul, contributing to its knowledge, because, for it, more than ever it’s possible to apply the expression: the ontogenesis of the town is summed up in its phylogenesis. Among the many subjects taking on and proposed by the design seminar, that of accessibility and the consequent re-design of the relationship open spaces of the monumental monastery, it’s immediately appeared as the best opportunity, able to confront with the theme deriving from the same generative process of the Neapolitan city, «built by quarrying the tuff in which it rests, [founding] its own weight in the porous layer that has built it». Naples has always recognized and manifested its essence, constituted in the dialogic and colloquial relationship between “ground and underground”.