La città disegnata: immagini della Cortina del Porto di Messina

The city of Messina was completely destroyed by the earthquake of 28 December 1908. The reconstruction of the city, starting from 1910, coincides with the history of his image. Desire, political and civil, are confronted on a tabula rasa, on a soil which has become a “place”. The city takes shape by its design. Before by urban design after by architecture design. Urban design is create by Master Plan drawn up by engineer Luigi Borzì. The Plan recover Plan Cerdà for Barcelona in 1860. A plan for a modern city. The principles of “Theoria General de la Urbanizacion” by Ildefonso Cerda, are fully assumed by the designer of the Plan for Messina: a regular chessboard, consisting of isolated baked on the ground cleared of the rubble of the nineteenth century city. The area made flat stretches between the coastline, including the falce” of the port up to the slopes of Peloritani. Inside the city, apparently rigid, happen a number of combinations that define the architectural image of the new city. The general form is that of an ordered sequence of events in which the road and the block are the main elements. An urban monument characteristic of the seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century city was excluded for “reasons of seismic safety”, it was the ancient Teatro Marittimo or Palazzata.