Isole di terraferma

Island is a synonym of finite, determined, detached, separated from the other, in other words parted from multiplicity and unpredictability; it is a place that offers stability, certainty, custom and safety at the same time. Many places, real, virtual or imaginary, are included in the definition of island: the human being, the home and by extension the defined, protected, private places. The pandemic crisis that we have experienced in the last year has highlighted how physical space, in its sense of a delineated and concluded place, is continuously redefined, in perception, by multiple factors such as virtuality, relationship, contiguity, memory. All these aspects fall under our senses in different ways and contribute to the creation of the identity of a place. The micro-cities of the Sicilian Ionian coast are saturated with architecture, and like stone jumbles tightened around the bulk of the mother church, they seem to float on the slopes of the Peloritani attached to the coast line by the tortuous course of the streams. They are like islands of mainland. An oxymoron that combines the material and social dimension of the city with the imaginary and self-referential ones of the island. These micro cities are isolated from the context not only by the rough roads and the distance from the coast line but also by the demographic and economic crisis. In these villages, perched on rocky spurs or lying on the hillside that slope down to the sea, the domestic space is a complex and multifaceted concept. In fact, the centre appears as a superimposition of areas of influence, belonging, tradition and polarity. Public space is never neutral, in fact it is filtered by perception, fruition, custom and contiguity. The challenge is to represent, poised between imagination and abstraction, the invisible web of relationships that animates these centres with three different approaches: Urban memory, between status quo and rêverie; Shells, the housing envelopes in vernacular architecture; Inhabiting, clues ot life. In this study, with the help of some graphic elaborations, we try to explicate a structure of invisible relationships that rebound in the hollow space of the centre. The first thing that comes to mind is an image of coloured marbles that flow on the walls of the houses, on the pavement of the streets, on the churchyard, on the volutes of the shelves of the balconies. The movement is overcome by gravity and friction but the sound and colour of the marbles end up defining, in negative, the ‘emptiness’ of the city filling itof elrationships.