Il lievito della città

The research work, whose outcomes are shown in the publication, has been coordinated by Concetta Fallanca De Blasio, scientific responsible within the agreement between the AACM Department and the CARICAL Foundation. The work has aimed at investigating the essence of the relation spaces and especially, of the exchange places considered as structural elements of the urban organization, in order to ideate planning proposals intended to preserve their vitality and their role which contribute to re-invent the identity of Mediterranean cities.The text “Places of Exchange and Mediterranean Cities. Histories, Cultures, Projects”, edited in 2003 by Concetta Fallanca De Blasio and Alireza Naser Esslami, pertains to this project area and the present edition, which brings in again its goals, represents in fact the second volume. The cities selected as case studies belong to five cultural macro-areas characterized by specific features and by different internal levels of identifiability .Maghreb cultural area represents Mediterranean West southern part and the cities of Marrakech, Tangier, Fez, Alger, Tunis and Tripoli well represent a specific point of view of the history and the events of this part of the Basin.Near East and Ottoman territories’ cultural area of is represented, in these works, by the cities of Cairo, Jerusalem, Saint John of Acre, Damask, Aleppo, Bursa and Istanbul. This territory, shaped as a large bow, presents a coastal facing of a deep inside area which spreads out until Far East and China, collects and offers exotic goods to Europe and which includes all the pilgrimage destinations of the three monotheist religions of Mediterranean area.Adriatic region and Aegean cultural area, encompassing the cities of Athens, Dubrovnik, Spalato, Trieste, Venice, Ancona and Bari, represents the East of an Occident full of the genes and evolutions of Doric, Greek, Byzantine and Ottoman Mediterranean. Latin Europe cultural area includes Italian Tyrrhenian coast, France and Spain and is represented by the cities of Naples, Livorno, Genoa, Marseille, Barcelona, Valencia, Granada, Seville and Lisbon.Insular Mediterranean is represented by the cities of Ajaccio, Cagliari, Palermo, Syracuse, Catania, La Valletta, Heraklion: they all are the extremely original outcomes of numerous and contrasting cultures which combine themselves with the traditional resistances of a geographic isolation which tends to turn its back on the sea but and at the same time to open up to every novelty.The present work falls within this ambit of reflection and, through an interpretative reading of the cities selected as case studies, offers an extensive treatment organized in passages which aims at clarifying specific interpretative and fact-finding aspects.Each of the 36 cities selected, 18 of which are presented in the first volume, is investigated in four passages.The opening passage wants to understand the role played by trade flows’ dynamics in the genesis and development of the city and its port, through the recomposition of the historical profile and the study of terrestrial and maritime nets of long-distance trades and pilgrimage paths as well. The periodizing interpretation records the “epoch-making” events which changed the city’s development and aims at understanding the meaning of the transformation of the concept of trade space.The second passage is dedicated to trade structural components, economic pushes, socio-cultural motivations, and political reasons, which gave shape to its characteristics. The integrated observation of economic components related to exchange systems, of socio-cultural components in terms of social representations (feasts, processions, pilgrimages, holy places) and of political aspects, through those events of terr