The architecture of the city contended between history and contemporary

The research carried an analytic study on one of the founding moments of the city of Naples and its architecture: the Greek-Roman period. An accurate analysis of the layers stratified through history drove to a deep understanding of that common ground for contemporary architecture and for contemporary design that looks for its renewed rules into the fabric of the historical city. Naples shows a unique situation in the whole world, an ancient town made of such a peculiar sequence of public and private spaces, elements and layers (streets, courtyards, cloisters, monasteries, fortification walls, and archaeology) that never ceases to evolve and to adapt itself to new social needs, in a constant process of mutual exchange between architecture and city life. The use of “private” spaces for public purposes reflects that principle of light and dark contrast typical of the historical centre and of Naples itself, with the renewed role of regeneration catalysts for such a stratified urban fabric. It means therefore to rediscover the measure of public space in the Greek-Roman fabric, a welcome return to the discipline, the theory, the design and construction that, through the research on via Tribunali, rediscovers the contemporary dimension of an ancient place such as the Decumano Maggiore.