VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE IN INSULAR ITALY: HERITAGE TO PRESERVE AND VALUE

Abstract

The Mediterranean civilisation, in its millenary history, has also expressed itself through particular artefacts that have strongly characterised the territory. Knowledge of the artefacts that "qualify" a territory, both in historical and material terms, is a necessary prerequisite for tackling the planning and management problems relating to their protection and conservation. The architecture of the "vernacular" is linked to domestic life, customs, the "dialects" of places and the essence of the Genius Loci. The building heritage of the islands surrounding Sicily features special building techniques and systems that exploit natural resources to generate original artefacts and extremely functional building technologies that can be re-evaluated in terms of eco- sustainability. To speak of architecture on the island of Pantelleria is to discover the ancient links between materials, techniques and landscape. The island is well known for its dammusi, interesting artefacts both for their morphological characteristics and their technological-constructive profile. These artefacts are important traces of an ancient building tradition where the domestic space was created in direct relation to the natural environment and developed in relation to daily needs. The study intends to describe the evolution of this building typology and to highlight the presence of the 'palazzetto' in the Pantelleria area, which from the typological and technological-constructive research carried out can be considered a derivative of the dammuso itself. This study is the result of a research that, starting from the identification of the artefacts (often integrated and sometimes made unrecognisable by the expansion building) and from the survey of the factory, comes to the classification of building types and construction techniques.