On 8 May, in Rome at the Spazio Europa Experience-Davide Sassoli, the conference promoted by C-EVE ‘New European Bauhaus and the tourism development model for the cultural villages of Southern Italy in the 2021-2027 programming cycle‘ was held. During the meeting, which saw the involvement of mayors and authorities from the places concerned and the speeches of Raffaele Fitto, Minister for European Affairs, the South, Cohesion Policies and the PNNR, Roberto Occhiuto, Governor of Calabria, Andrea Messina, Regional Councillor for Sicily, project promoters Carlotta Previti, an expert in cohesion policies and Valentina Marciano, a lawyer and institutional consultant in EU funding, and the architect Maria Rita Udardi, the conference was attended by the President of the Italian Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Research and Energy. Maria Rita Udardi, a large and articulated programme was presented for the regeneration, redevelopment and revitalisation – in short, a sort of Renaissance – of more than forty villages with important historical and cultural values located between Calabria and Sicily and now unfortunately in an advanced stage of decay and depopulation. This is an all-Italian plan to promote conscious tourism in these localities, quality demographic growth compatible with existing and future resources, and the establishment of new entrepreneurial, social, cultural and artistic activities through architectural and micro-urban planning based on values of beauty, functionality and sustainability.
Carlotta Previti and Valentina Marciano availed themselves of the creative talent of Nick Maltese Studio, a young and brilliant Milanese design firm that has rapidly risen to a leading position in the sector. The studio’s two co-founders, Nick Maltese and Fede Pagetti, provided their well-established professionalism, expertise, imagination and creativity, with the invaluable technical support of Arch. Udardi. The studio tackled the guidelines of the operation with a great deal of audacity and just as much rationality, outlining solutions that were as impeccable in terms of architectural and urban planning logic and rationality as they were impactful in terms of emotion and surprise. “For this project,” they observe, “we really put everything into play. It is a plural and complex work, which, as was said at the conference, aims to restore cultural, social, tourism and economic impetus to some forty small villages and towns scattered between Calabria and Sicily. In our case, it does so by initiating and stimulating, through targeted and non-invasive redevelopment, re-use, and architectural, urban planning and landscape recovery, a process of transformation of the respective territories aimed at the establishment of new creative and cultural activities – from design to art -, the return of ancient skills, the revival of craftsmanship, a zero-kilometre agriculture of the highest quality, the birth of new entrepreneurs and their involvement in a circuit of events with a broad cultural imprint planned over several years. Always keeping in mind that ‘transformation calls for transformation”.
Focusing on the various aspects of the initiative involved a large number of design challenges: identifying the most suitable sites and situations potentially meeting the objectives of the plan, i.e. the so-called ‘laboratory zones’, analysing the critical, historical, cultural, environmental and economic factors of each intervention in order to define the most effective and efficient operational strategies to magnify the context devise the concept, the pièce de résistance and the narratum of each of them based primarily on contemporary sensitivities, assess the immediate effects and hypothesise the future economic and social costs and benefits, and finally detail and draw up the plans, explanatory renderings and project reports.
There is also a deeper reading level. “To give expressive force to the project,” reason Maltese and Pagetti, “we worked a lot on the concept of ‘architectural iconism’. What we live in is the era of iconism, or, according to the Treccani’s definition, “a world of signs that refer by similarity to the denoted reality”, a language interwoven with iconic symbolism that simplifies and makes immediate the perception that ‘there is something else behind’. It serves to give meaning and increased significance to the designer’s intervention. In our case, we wanted to instil this symbolic iconicity in building and urban contexts that are often neglected, degraded even abandoned over time, thus transforming them into fertile opportunities to explore new forms of creative expression and architectural innovation. Our project to transform abandoned villages into lively cultural centres also stems from such considerations and is characterised by a bold and visionary approach.”
The works designed by the Studio are therefore conceived to become focal points in the urban environment, not only for their visual impressiveness, but also for their ability to inspire and guide, to weave change into the context in which they insist, without obliterating its historical dimension and tradition. Dynamic signs of a cultural anthropology still in the making, they will contribute to defining a renewed identity of places, embodying the creative spirit, expectations and ambitions of the community in which they are inserted. They will be true drivers of social, cultural and economic activities, destined to enliven and enrich the urban fabric, but above all the lives of the people who will be its protagonists.
All the more so since the places chosen are geographically and historically heterogeneous, some on the coasts and littorals, others on the plateau or in the mountains, with a centuries-long, if not millennia-long past behind them, or recently established. For their part, the prefigured interventions do not so much aim at the recovery of historic centres, for which one can refer to a vast literature, but rather involve unprecedented urban and landscape mending and rehabilitation and new architectural stylistic features, they allude to and foreshadow new ways of using, living in and bringing to life the villages concerned in communication and practice, they baptise new urban routes and paths, they imply new service networks, new interior design solutions, and the staging of real and ever-changing storytelling. In short, they want to activate real ‘creative districts’ by elaborating on the themes of residence, production, training, supported by the people who work and interface for them.
To make all this a reality, the project envisages the use of daring architectural forms, but never an end in themselves, which take their cue from and reform with contemporary sensitivity the lessons of many currents and movements of the past and present; traditional local and innovative materials, in any case eco-sustainable; volumes, colours and finishes in harmony with the nearby urban landscape and even with the more distant natural one; avant-garde spatial, technological and energy solutions: all in the sign of that ‘historical contemporaneity’ that underlies the entire project. A complex of constructive and conceptual inputs that aim to make this project for the renaissance of ‘forgotten’ villages and towns, minor ones that are not minor, a manifesto and a model for future interventions in other geographical areas of the country and even in the world.
