The Port of Naples and the perspectives of a dialogue between conservation and regeneration

The port of Naples is a topical theme for many aspects, largely related to the role that it can play to improve the relationship between the eastern part of the city and the sea itself as well as between this latter and the historic center. Its urban value − resulting of the succession of interventions from the first half of the Eighteenth century until today and which have seen the production of fillings, new piers and docks onto the sea − joins the value of many architectures that are arranged along the city waterfront by defining a compact strip between the urban parts and the sea. These architectures, resulting of projects and realizations conducted over the past three centuries, from St. Vincenzopier to the Fish market by Luigi Cosenza eastwards, constitute “memories” on a complex story, extensively altered by bombings in World War II. The paper, as the first result of an in progress interdisciplinary educational project, aims to explore the complex interaction between the urban part and historical buildings and, more specifically, between the present-day layout of the harbor and the architectures that have survived the war damages, highlighting issues related to a possible and stimulating dialectic between urban transformation and restoration of architecture. A “systematic” approach, based on a specific and methodologically pluritematic knowledge of individual artifacts and on the design verification of their transformative potential, enables to outline the broad cultural value of the urban landscape of the port area where, besides the presence of dense built volumes, tangible testimonies of the use of the site before World War II (or just above) are still recognizable and whose architectural features significantly refer to their function. Buildings that are often abandoned, derelict or underused − such as General Stores, the Immacolatella, the Tirrenia Stores and the Silos Granari, or even the building of the Southern Docks and eastwards, the Fish market − can be conceived as privileged places to experience a balanced and differentiated coexistence of old and new and, within a contextual view, as landmarks of a wider transformative consideration able to greatly improve the fruition of the port in its relations with the mainland and the sea.