A Preliminary Study for the Knowledge Process: Pier Luigi Nervi’s Taormina Stadium

The article highlights the fragilities of a specific category of 20th-century heritage, namely football stadiums. These architectures are even more vulnerable as they are subject to continuous regulatory and performance adjustments that clash with the building’s cultural, historical and technical values. Therefore, there is a need to raise awareness of the protection of these architectural works so that interventions can be carried out that combine technical innovation and heritage conservation. The paper provides a synthesis of the research conducted on football stadiums designed and built by Pier Luigi Nervi, in collaboration with his son Antonio, in Italy’s second half of the 20th century. The analysis was carried out on various levels to grasp their specificities, understand their current state, and make the necessary comparisons to identify a case study for further evaluation. The Taormina stadium is a unicum concerning the others considered, both for its compositional and structural components and for additional vulnerabilities that denote it and, at the same time, constitute an exceptional example. Archive research and field investigations outline this architecture’s original characteristics and current state of conservation. This process of anamnesis shows how awareness-raising assumes a fundamental role in assisting the different competencies involved in preserving these assets.