La "pietra" nelle cupole della ricostruzione a Messina: artificiale VS naturale

The application of the “Borzì Plan” to rebuild Messina "where it was", involved the demolition, dismantling and moving near of almost all the churches, even those that had not been destroyed by the earthquake. Only from the second decade of the twentieth century the Curia succeeded in obtaining the necessary funds to return to the citizens a suitable number of worship buildings in place of the approximately 40 wood houses built at the expense of the Holy See (Vatican City State) to carry out the function. Famous architects, such as Cesare Bazzani, Francesco Valenti, Carlo Saladino del Bono, but also technicians from the Curia, derive by historical models the type plants, the decorative and stylistic apparatuses and in a dozen specimens also the vaulted systems. Precisely to the domes which, often notwithstanding the anti-seismic prescriptions, were strongly desired by the designers for the direct reference to the "homonymous" churches that replaced, this analysis is aimed at verifying how the "forced" choice of the reinforced concrete has contaminated the architectural peculiarities, the static conceptions, the construction site, and how much the archetipi, historically of natural stone, have influenced the design practice and theories of calculation. An "engineering" knowledge, the one here sought, which appears necessary to start a proper path of conservation and enhancement of these rare specimens of cultural heritage, determined by the anomalous synthesis between an emerging anti-seismic culture, to be applied, and an attachment to historical-architectural memory, to be protected.