Between permanence and transformation. The project for the Arab-Norman Heritage in the contemporary city of Palermo

Within the contemporary landscape, the presence of archaeological, historical, and architectural heritage compels a reflection on the relationship it establishes with its surroundings – urban, natural, or rural – from which it is often separated by limits and discontinuities that compromise its comprehension and use. The research focuses on Palermo, the result of a complex process that, over time, has intertwined cultures, languages, and forms. The city, marked today by multiple layers legible through the interpretation of traces of the past, reveals a fragmented urban landscape shaped by the heterogeneous and uncontrolled expansion of the last century, which has led to the loss of the forma urbis and of the historical relationship between city and countryside that once defined Palermo, between its often-marginalised heritage and its broader context. In this framework, the heritage project within the contemporary city becomes a tool to reconnect these presences in the urban space and, at the same time, to understand the transformations that have shaped the city’s historical form, starting from the knowledge of pre-existences and the interpretation of traces as constitutive elements of urban morphology. This theoretical reflection finds a design exemplification in the project hypothesis for the “Regio Sollazzo of Uscibene”, one of the Arab-Norman palatial architectures mythically set within the magnificent and imaginatively infinite Genoardo, aimed at investigating how the architectural and territorial project can activate new relationships between historical persistences, urban fabric, and contemporary city, guiding the transformations of space and landscape to recompose and re-signify the relations between memory and transformation, restoring continuity and meaning to these places.