FORGIVING A PLACE: THE CASE OF THE PIONTA CITADEL IN AREZZO, ITALY

Abstract: Arezzo is placed in the middle of Italy, a town in Tuscany with a rich and intense story. Even if such a thing is true for a lot of old town in Italy and abroad, in the story of Arezzo there is an ancient and complex event which has cancelled a piece of the timeline in the history of this town. There was a time when the hillock named “Pionta” was closed by walls protecting a small independent citadel, governed by bishops, with its own churches and politically aligned with the Pope and the Vatican State. This small enclave in the Tuscany territory ended being tolerated in the XVI century. In 1561 Cosimo de’ Medici ordered the destruction of this walled town, bringing to the ground all the buildings and trying to cancel the existence of this place not only from the terrain, but apparently from the historical memory. Even if the presence of this area remained at a latent state in the memory of the population, the buildings on the hill were demolished and probably their materials reused somewhere else, while only minor parts of the previous churches and chapels were reused and adapted in combination with new constructions. In 2014, a new research about this area has been started, based on the collaboration between the cultural association “Academo, Roberta Pellegrini” and the “Dipartimento di Architettura” of the Florence University. The digital survey data treatment, the reading of the architectural traces, the interpretation of the original projects -made following the logic of Architecture- and a specific investigation about the state of the knowledge about this area, have brought the basis for starting to hypothesize a map of the next possible excavations, while other common solutions to investigate the underground (like georadar survey and visual analysis of the anomalies) turned out to be not so usable, because of the strong transformation of the ground which is mixed with ruins and fragmented parts creating a very “noisy” and uniform terrain, in this way only a direct excavation, planned by clear guidelines, can give results. Because the state of ruins and the poor remains of most of the excavated areas, it was decided to proceed comparing other architectures and getting the digital survey of any elements “connected” to the original settlement and its architectures. The study and analysis of the architectural traces and indications is allowing the gradual interpretation of the original design of large part of the buildings. All the digital tools have been used focusing on the will to understand and discover traces of the original asset of this place, trying to bring back in the memory of the people the presence of their past. The research presented here will bring the status of its advances about the survey data, virtual reconstruction, methods and techniques used to enhance the knowledge about a lost architecture and urban settlement.