Rammendare la memoria, tra conservazione di resti materiali e riconoscimento di frammenti intangibili. Il caso di Poggioreale antica (TP)

This contribution questions the future of those places that, abandoned after a catastrophe, are still fully recognizable in their essential characteristics and in which it is possible to perceive links of memory with the life that took place there and was suddenly interrupted. The interest in these places, which has increased in recent years, constitutes an opportunity for reflection on the nature of the protection to be carried out and on the declination of possible interventions to slow down the processes of degradation and progressive loss. The reflection will move around the case of ancient Poggioreale, a small Sicilian town abandoned after the Belice Valley earthquake in 1968, left to a destiny of inexorable decline and forcibly forgotten by its community. The passage of more than half a century since the event has given us a ruin whose physical weakening is progressing more and more, leading also to the loss of the memory of the life of its community. The material condition of Poggioreale leads to the question of whether a strategy aimed at bringing the settlement back to life is feasible or whether it is not more reasonable to think of the ruins as having an archaeological use, feasible with conservation interventions other than those conceivable for its re-functionalization. The emotional involvement deriving from the resistant architecture of Poggioreale seems to suggest the importance of recomposing the collective memory of the place, in which the conservation of the material remains made up of the architecture still standing and a largely recognizable fabric is linked to the recognition and valorisation of the intangible fragments, that is, all the aspects linked to the memory of what this place was and the ways of life of its community