Thesis title: Narrare i paesaggi: La forma del territorio e il patrimonio archeologico della Puglia
Archaeology today is the architecture of the past. Since ancient times, cities have rested upon the land, interpreting geography and developing a constructive and technical knowledge directly related to the morphology of places. By adapting each time to territories with different characteristics, built forms have always expressed settlement patterns that directly reflected their relationship with the landscape.
These relationships, which historically contributed to the ordering and measurement of the territory in various ways, still retain a primary value in the interpretative observation of the structural phenomena of territories and cities. In this sense, the critical reading of the compositional and formal principles derived from the ancient city can be understood as a cognitive and methodological design process –one that recognizes ancient archetypes in order to reinterpret them through a new contemporary lens.
This perspective conceives the study and reading of the territory as a stratified system, composed of reciprocal relationships among elements –often heterogeneous– where geography and infrastructure act as primary conditions that have guided the birth and development of the most varied anthropic forms and land uses, thus shaping a landscape of strong identity.
Ancient settlements, as structuring components of that landscape, although today they have lost their “narrative” value –due to their fragmentation and isolation within the territory– nonetheless represent a spatial and formal framework that allows us to read and interpret the configuration of the territory as the outcome of relationships between anthropic and natural forms, through compositional logics that have determined its configuration.
From this standpoint, the research adopts a typological and relational approach to investigate the forms of archaeology as they relate to the forms of the land, recognizing archaeology as a key interpretative lens for understanding the entire Apulian landscape –the logics that have inscribed themselves upon the land and shaped its current configurations. It offers a reflection on the value that archaeological heritage may assume in contemporaneity, through the reinterpretation of ancient principles within project for archaeology, following a methodological process of decomposition and recomposition that reveals the specific settlement characters of each territory.
In a perspective that shifts the focus from a historicist vision to an architectural and compositional approach, the ancient city emerges in this work as a device of knowledge –both archaeological and architectural– in which the relationships between morphology, structure, and built forms reveal an ordering principle comparable in value to that of contemporary cities.
This objective expands toward a broader, territorial scale, emphasizing the idea of integration understood as the creation of a territorial network capable of overcoming the fragmented view of individual sites, moving instead toward a relational vision of heritage among the various sites composing the Apulian archaeological landscape. Within this context, ancient routes assume a central role as primary infrastructural forms that have shaped the relationships between settlements and territory since antiquity.
The research ultimately aims to propose a new critical method for reading landscapes, particularly the ancient city, by recognizing its ordering principles and identifying the relational structure not only among its parts but also with the place in which it is situated and with its broader context. Within this framework, the study introduces a new definition of the Network System of Archaeological Areas, which expresses –through the articulation of relationships among diverse parts– the nature and identity of archaeological places. Specifically, it advances a narrative intended as an act of re-signification, as a recognition of the value that ancient cities hold within a complex territorial structure, shaping settlement models.
The internal relational structure found in each model makes it possible to identify points of tension that can be interpreted as potential project nodes, defining design directions and actions that foster a more attentive formal and spatial reading, an innovative compositional approach that opens new reflections on archaeology as an opportunity for critical engagement with architectural design.