WHY AN ITALIAN PIAZZA IS NOT JUST A SQUARE Grazia Micciche

Transcription

1 WHY AN ITALIAN PIAZZA IS NOT JUST A SQUARE Grazia Micciche This article is the output of the lecture on The Italian Piazza and Landscape, which has teken place in October 2008 at the Australian National Universitay, during the 8th Italian Language Week Celebration. This lecture has also seen as main Guest Speaker reknown architect Dr Armaldo Giurgola, famous all over the world for his innovative style, and famous in Australia for his project and realization of the Australian Parliament building in Canberra. No English word translates the full meaning of the Italian word piazza. In fact, Square is strictly related to space definition, and finds its origin in a word indicating a tool used to measure square angles. Plaza comes from Spanish,but nowadays it is used in English to indicate an open space inside or immediately outside a shopping centre. Common indicates public areas in some areas of New England, and it isn t in use in other English speaking areas, although the word has its origin in the Middle Ages, at the end of the 13th century, and comes from Latin communis, i.e. public, shared by many. Court, green, marketplace, park, and place, listed by the Thesaurus Encyclopedic Dictionary of English, all relate to their space characteristics or to the function of the area they signify, and fail to catch the social role of this public space, a cultural and theatrical element which is distinctive of the Italian word. But why do we speak about a theatrical meaning of the word piazza? Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, an architect and engineer in activity during Octavian Augustus Empire, in year 30 or 20 B.C., wrote a series of volumes known as Ten books on architecture. His ideas on urban planning are deeply rooted in Greek civilation and philosophy. An architect, he writes, should know geometry, but also philosophy, history, physiology, medicine, and law. Architecture should follow the principles of firmitas, utilitas, venustas (Ten b. ch 1.1), that is soundness, utility, and attractiveness. On the idea of Forum, he writes: The Greeks design fora on a square plan with exceedingly spacious double porticoes. In Italy, however, one should not proceed by the same method because from our ancestors we have inherited the custom of giving gladiatorial games in the forum, and therefore there should be more intercolumnations around what Vitruvius calls the perfomance space (Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, p.77) In his project guidelines, his idea of Forum is a space which is often square, or rectangular, because it must contain the Senate, the treasury, and the jail, with a side open for the buildings to be seen and for the people to come in. On the other hand, he remarks the concept of Forum as a space whose function is to allow human activity, such as sport perfomances and tournaments. 94

2 When analizing, the image reconstructions made form Vitruvius s texts, one can find plans of Italian towns and squares of the Middle Ages which appear strictly connected to his projects. See Piazza San marco in Venice, where Palazzo Ducale, the Basilica of San Marco and the so-called Procurature take the place of the senate, Isis s temple, the Justice building and the Treasury, and all this space opens towards the sea. 95

3 See also Monteriggioni, 20 Km north of Siena, which resembles Vitruvius s Project on rural towns. Vitruvius writes that the dimension of a forum should be based on the population; its area should be neither too cramped for efficiency nor so large that for lack of population it looks deserted (ibid., p.66) The composition of buildings should follow the principles of symmetry and proportion, and ought to have an exact system of correspondence of the likeness of a well formed human being (ibid.) On the one hand, Vitruvius, in the Ten books on Architecture, creates a model of functional city that from Rome could be exported in other areas of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, when talking about building temples in symmetry with the proportions of a human being, he shifts his train of thought from a functional approach to a philosophical level. He writes that, according to Plato and the ancients, ten was the perfect number, whereas for Greek matemathicians six was the perfect number. Ten risulted from the number of human fingers, whereas number six was based on the fact that a human foot is the sixth part of a human body. In any case, he says, if it is agreed [ ] that a correspondence of dimension exists among individual elements 96

4 and the appearance of the entire body in each of its parts, then it is left to us to recognize that the ancients [ ] ordered the elements of those [architectural] works so that, in both their shape and their symmetries, fitting dimensions of separate elements and of the work as a whole might be created (ibid., p.48) Since we have no drawings left from Vitruvius s books (as a matter of fact what we are looking at are drawings based on his texts), various artists turned his theories into images. One of them was Leonardo da Vinci, with his so-called Vitruvian Man Leonardo represents one of the protagonists of the development of Humanism in the 15th century. Classic Latin and Greek culture was translated and influenced an era dominated by the political philosophy which found its best expression in Il Principe, by Niccolo Machiavelli. Leon Battista Alberti, in his treatise De Architectura wrote a project of the ideal city, as space of representation of power and social development in the world.the concept of Ideal City became reality thanks to the creation of the town of Pienza by Bernardo Rossellino, commissioned by his patron Pope Pio II, alias Aeneas Silvio Piccolimini. Another relevant example in this sense is the painting The Ideal City, painted by Francesco Laurana, or Piero Della Francesca, today shown at the Urbino National Gallery, which formerly was the Palazzo built by Duke Federico di Montefeltro in the Marche Region. 97

5 So, the function of Italian piazza partially derives from the Latin Forum, that has its roots in the Greek agora.in 5th century s BC Pericles Athens, the Agora was a public space suited for marketplace, space for religious gatherings, and for juridical and political action. Agora comes from ago (lead, move) and agon (meeting place), and is related to the Italian word agire and the English to act or to perform an action. On the other hand, the social and theatrical role of the Italian piazza. i.e. the concept of space where a social performance (attending and partaking in gladiatorial games and acting ) takes place comes from the Latin platea and the Greek plateia. As a matter of fact, the word platea is still found in modern Italian with the meaning of audience, or theatre area where the audience sits. And The Greek word plateia is used in modern Greek with the meaning of town square, i.e. area where public events and celebrations of all kind take place. See Piazza del Campo on an ordinary day, and during the Palio About two thousand years after Vitruvius s writings on the function of the Roman Forum, philosopher and sociologist Hannah Arendt, in her book The Human Condition, written in 1958, highlights the fundamental role played in society by public space. Men and women find their identity as social beings through their engagement in the public sphere, as opposed to the private sphere of their life. Hanna Arendt sees the public space, that can be identified with the Italian piazza, as an entity where people can act and find their own identity as individuals and as a social group through the performance of speech, dialogue interaction. As already said, the Greek word that means piazza is Agora. In a piazza, people see themselves speak and act reflecting each other s speech and that 98

6 makes them feel a political force, i.e. a group that belongs to the polis, to a specific socially organized entity. Again, here is the theatrical quality of the piazza, which becomes a performing space, where men and women are at the same time actors and spectators (and this explains the use of the word Piazza deriving from platea, audience) inside a social event. This is a religious celebration in honour of Saint Agata, patron of the city of Catania, in Sicily The Carnival celebration in Venice. In Vitruvius s book, we find all the elements that later on characterized the development of the Italian piazza. Its complexity derives from a series of intertwined elements: functional, social, and ideal. One more element should be added to this list, namely the cultural one, which comes from adjusting the piazza area to its ever changing function throughout history. The progressive literal adding of layers of matter over the old ones in order to create new Piazzas (see Piazza Navona, or Piazza Anfiteatro in Lucca), the creation of new architectural projects over the old ones in relationship to a new given function meant giving that space a cultural depth, where the new also maintains the memory of the old. This depth, and this sort of architectorial memory, the invisible DNA, is what makes people come from suburbs and meet in the historic old piazzas. 99

7 Lucca, Piazza Anfiteatro, formerly a Roman Amphiteatre Rome, Piazza Navona, a former bigae competion trackfield Bibliography: Arendt, Hannah, The human Condition, 1958, Chicago, University of Chicago Press Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture, translated by Ingrid D. Rowland, commentary and illustrations by Thomas Noble Howe, 1999, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Grazia Micciche` Lecturer of Italian at the Australian National University, sent by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy 100