La prima isola / THE FIRST ISLAND

THE FIRST ISLAND. Ischia, a fragile island, is an exceptional experimental field of 're-foundation', both international and local, for a renewed 'spirit of the time' that has brought landscape, ecology and nature back to the fore in the imaginary of communities and cities. The earthquake in the summer of 2017 highlighted its consistency as an active volcano and, at the same time, the high degree of risk produced by invasive tourism and indiscriminate abusive consumption of land. Today, in the scenario of the Neapolitan metropolitan city established in 2015, Ischia returns to being 'the first island'. Its historical and geological heritage unique in the world, built over the millennia by volcanism and man, expresses a renewed vocation as 'ancient center' of this larger urban and territorial dimension. The city, like the ancient polis, has returned to include the entire provincial territory, from the 'Gulf to the north' to the 'Golfo del Cratere'. In this enlarged perimeter of contemporary Naples is Ischia, with Cuma and the Phlegraean archipelago, the mythical place of origins that gave birth to the foundation of Neapolis. The interpretative angle proposed and investigated by the design experiments of the Villard 20 seminar rediscovers the semantic value of the natural monuments that structured the relational and landscape matrix of the first Greek polis of the West, that 'natural polycentrism' which over the centuries has constituted the constant settlement principle of Neapolitan city.