Entrare in città: di archi e di porte

Abstract

The city gate is a spatially complex structure, articulated by environments diversified by function and morphology: the transit entrance hall, the garrison room, the customs office, the health control center (nerve center in recurrent epidemics), the police station with the small prison and even a small chapel (sometimes summarized in a sacred image painted on a wall). However, the door is above all the place of transit, of the passage from an outside to an inside and viceversa, but it is also the place of barrier and exclusion. This ambiguity is at the origin of an intrinsic conceptual (and morphological) complexity that influences the imagination, igniting expectations and fears for what lies beyond every door: the visible but unknown city. All the duplicity of the city gate, its spatial and conceptual ambiguity, are the basis of the essays collected in the volumes.