The City through its Layers. Design Strategies for the Archaeological Complex of Carminiello ai Mannesi, Naples

"Urban archaeology takes as the center of its interest the city itself the urban phenomenon rather than any particular period in the city’s history (...). Cities are the largest and most complex archaeological sites" (Biddle, 1983). Building upon this premise, this contribution offers a critical and interpretative reading of the archaeological site par excellence – the city – focusing on the historic centre of Naples as its primary field of investigation. Owing to its extraordinary density of diachronic traces and figures, Naples unmistakably stages the theme of a contemporary "complexity" made intelligible precisely through the persistence of its millennia-old per strigas urban layout. Within this framework, the contribution departs from a well-established disciplinary assumption to look at archaeology through the eyes of architecture, for, as Auguste Perret succinctly stated, "architecture is what makes ruins beautiful". By interrogating the "layers of the city" through a "sectional" reading, the paper develops a design investigation focused on the double insula that houses the archaeological complex of Carminiello ai Mannesi – an unresolved node within the Neapolitan palimpsest, whose emergence at the level of the contemporary city demands the broad perspective of an urban project. A project conceived around a specific interpretation of the city’s architecture decoding the relationships among the signs imprinted within the urban form, opening new connections of meaning between figures and memories of place, and revealing potentialities of use and form embedded within the characters of the city.