Thesis title: L’architettura del Palazzo della Ragione a Ferrara e il dibattito sui centri storici nella metà del XX secolo
The subject of the present research is the Palazzo della Ragione in Ferrara, designed by the architect Marcello Piacentini and constructed between 1955 and 1957, following the demolition of the ancient building erected in the early fourteenth century to house the city’s court of justice.
The original Palazzo della Ragione was inaugurated in 1326 on the former Piazza delle Erbe—today Piazza Trento e Trieste—facing the southern side of the thirteenth-century Cathedral of San Giorgio Martire, where, prior to the eighteenth-century interventions, stood the so-called Porta dei Mesi.
Fires, earthquakes, and the abandonment that followed Ferrara’s devolvement to the Papal States in 1598, marking the end of the Este duchy, brought about profound transformations in the structure and architectural character of the Palazzo.
The final reconstruction, necessitated by the devastating fire of 1944, was entrusted to Marcello Piacentini, who, about a decade after the event, created an example of contextualized modern architecture. Although approved, the project was met with a certain reticence by members of the reconstituted Consiglio Superiore di Belle Arti, among them Gustavo Giovannoni, Roberto Pane, and Guglielmo De Angelis d’Ossat.
Piacentini’s intervention and the new layout of the Palazzo formed part of a broader program of urban renewal, linked to the rehabilitation works of the San Romano district, in an attempt to translate into practice Giovannoni’s theories of urban thinning (diradamento urbano).
Grounded in a critical-conservative methodological approach, the research aims to reconstruct the building history of the Palazzo della Ragione by analyzing the transformations and restorations that shaped its evolution in relation to different orientations of architectural and urban restoration theory, and to investigate how these theoretical frameworks influenced the project’s conceptual and operational choices.