Viaggio in Abruzzo. Immagini di architettura negli scrittori/viaggiatori del Novecento

To the voices of the “writers/travellers” I associated those of the curators of the tourist guides, in particular those of the TCI or the CAI, timely testimony of what the architectural and urban realities were before crucial events for the history of the territory such as earthquakes or wars or after them, such as the descriptions of the towns that surrounded what had been Lake Fucino or of the monuments after their baroque appearance had been erased. Through their certain regard we have extraordinary and “synthetic” images such as that of the “low-arched heavy aqueduct” erected in 1256 in Sulmona in Piazza Garibaldi which, according to Katharine Putnam Hooker, insinuates itself “like a great caterpillar” into the houses. According to Alberto Savinio the aqueduct “crosses the city like an enormous caterpillar, now in the open, now diving into the houses”. After the demolition of these houses, which occurred in 1960, Giorgio Manganelli instead cites the “medieval aqueduct that crosses the city, a rare example of a long-limbed, even serpentine monument”. Giorgio Manganelli appears to be the most continuous and brilliant, not only for the individual images, on an architectural or urban scale. Extremely effective is the description of S. Bernardino all’Aquila, in which in a few lines Manganelli identifies the stylistic period and the architectural references of the façade, the character of the building as a “crown” of the city and the urban significance of the staircase. Unforgettable are then, in that Pescara that “between the station and the sea is a grid designed by a keen surveyor”, the images of the “isolated houses, low in the midst of the snappy cubic buildings; houses with some charm of balconies and bay windows, with barely modulated portals: a hint of the late nineteenth century” that the writer calls “aunts” among all the others who are instead “nieces” and who “like nieces have good health but little grace. They make a racket; a visual racket, naturally”. This is therefore one of the main reasons for the study’s interest: reading the «interpretation » of Abruzzo architecture by someone who was not an architect but who was able to grasp the hidden meaning of architecture, thanks to the sensitivity of the writer and the investigative ability of the traveler. That, ultimately, they taught us to see as well as to look. From a chronological point of view, the analysis starts from Thomas Ashby’s first trip to Abruzzo (1901) and ends with the publication of Mario Pomilio’s writings by the Regional Council (1997) or, better, with the Carlo Azeglio Ciampi interview (2001) which constitutes the best judgment regarding a land that has been able to fly in the most painful contingencies, pushed upwards by its own nature despite the weight of its legacies and backwardness, like the bumblebee does. And, mind you, the wings of this bumblebee are here art and architecture, which together are worth as the first and last instrument of redemption of that same land, as Guido Ceronetti well understood.