Stazioni Centrale e Marittima a Messina: da Angiolo Mazzoni alla precarietà dell’esistenza

Some have called Messina a “precarious city”, perhaps in reference to the trauma inherited from the earthquake of the early 1900s. More than a century later, the sense of precariousness seems to remain, renewed and transformed due to other events and, paradoxically, one of the greatest examples of its reconstruction, fulcrum of the contemporary contradictions that make existence ephemeral. The architectural complex designed by Angiolo Mazzoni, promised and looked to a future in which, through modern languages, architecture became a means of infrastructural power, of the conquests of mobility and the crossing of territories and waters. It housed ferrous bundles that drew sequential spaces, resonant of mechanical sounds that, upon leaving, impregnated and drew the entire southern area of the city. The ferment and promises of the 1950s are replaced today by the silence of a perennial wait that makes every choice and the ferrous monster static, as a sleeping elephant waiting for trial. The cyclical arrival or disappearance of another infrastructure – the big bridge – leaves open every action linked to the natural disposal of sediments, spaces and urban areas that should, on the other hand, naturally trigger transformations and regenerations. The oscillation towards every possible action generates the cancellation of the action itself, leaving space for old or new forms of precariousness.