Morphological principles and urban traces in the Archaeological Park of the Thermae of Baia

Amidst our cultural heritage, archaeological heritage holds a special aura in its essence as a distiller of memories that preserve and retain multiple time facets: time of antiquity, time of tran¬sformations, time of stratifications, time of neglect, time of pillaging and oblivion, time of unveiling. Heritage – with its extreme fragility, which is not only physical but also inherent in the tran¬smission of its witnessing existence – opens up a vast field of occurrences whose complex and articulated unveiling makes it particularly prolific as an active bearer of memories. Ru¬ins provide a layered accumulation of artistic manifestations, hermetically condensing multi¬ple pasts for which «[...] they double the enigma by exacerbating their beauty» (Augé, 2003). Remains, due to their singularity and multitude of meanings, share certain characteristics with contemporary constructions. Among these, the act of bringing to light stands out as a kind of con-structive event that becomes explicit on building-sites; there the verticality of activities – almost always downwards regarding the formers and upwards for the latters, aside from initial phases or special cases – evokes multiple pasts, remote or recent, which in any case shape pending spaces. The landscape made of ruins - needing to rediscover traces and signs of architecture or fragments of entire cities, in their achieved presence - necessarily merges with the spectacle of nature, thus bestowing upon it a time mark. The persistent relationship between ruins and buildings under construction displays how powerful the constructive act is, creating a tempo¬rary balance where time seems to stop between past and future and inexorably affects them.