“Sensing to the past” like a new paradigm: knowledge and experience on fortified architectures

The architectural stratification, as a sign of its spatial, historical and temporal reality, is a condition that represents the continuous activity of the man who builds, modifies, adapts a pre-existence to its needs: systems of protection and punctual defense of the territory and its population, specialize their functions and turn into castles. The pages of the “story” of this construction are stone words, written by many hands, that tell transformations, changes and are the witnesses of an architecture enhanced by new meanings: a complex system of “signs of time”, cultural signs related to the methods of construction and natural signs linked to the duration of the things in their interaction with the environment that is shaped and corrupt with new configurations by the human action. These signs identify the “character” of architecture: its aura. Aura considered as an aesthetic-cognitive experience linked to “sensing” the past, the object’s uniqueness and unrepeatability, that special, sacrosanct quid, that special fascination that emanates from an object and that in its materials retains the signs of its life throughout space and time. The aim of each intervention becomes not to miss this experience’s opportunity that have to be protected as “the most precious heritage” that the past leaves us. Hence the need of the project as a words of the story of this knowledge path: an “unveiling” that cross the “threshold” between what it was and will be. The project of a new use is configured as a “timid write” that draws by fragile relational grafts, scenarios of perception and enjoyment able to generate new “life cycles”. This perspective of our study will be developed through some works on fortified buildings of different contexts, where the theme of the ruin and the rest returns the “memory” as remembered present, simultaneously evoking an absence and a presence, an intersection between the visible and invisible.