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The city is a subject of narration under different points of view – technical, scientific, literary and artistic ones – expressing themselves through specific languages. Besides these “external languages” there is also a typical language of the city which constantly writes and rewrites parts, configuring the city as a palimpsest. The city tells itself to the user-observer of its external spaces, who perceives the city’s messages through the senses and re-elaborates them through mental filters, translating them into perceptions. In the contemporary city a sense of disorientation is being perceived, giving rise to worries, anxiety, fears; “tensions” in one word. The reasons of this discomfort may be found also in the effects of globalisation, which has generated an imbalance between the virtual and the real, the global and the local, introducing discontinue fragments of globalism in the neighbourhoods, exasperating fears and mistrust, and consolidating differences, exclusion and segregation.

The dialogue between the ancient and the historical has developed on the anthropized territory, in the continuity and discontinuity, defining the spaces of residence, production, living, on which protection restrictions have been placed. Archaeology, landscape architecture and recently ecology give new life and reconfiguration to the past, which expresses itself through renewed languages, so that the signs testify not only past conditions, but also the present ones, as collective heritage connecting the past, the present and the future. Classic archaeology – through the ancient language, mural inscriptions, epigraphs and tombstones, street paths and objects of “material culture”, as well as through the support of direct and indirect documentary sources – tells about architecture and planning, aristocratic and plebeian life, opulence and poverty. Another kind of archaeology has rooted, the so called “industrial” one, related to dismissed productive areas. Nowadays the challenge is about a regeneration process able to connect properly conservation and transformation.

La città è oggetto di narrazione secondo plurimi punti di vista, tecnici, scientifici, letterari e artistici che si esprimono con specifici linguaggi. Accanto a questi “linguaggi esterni” esiste anche un linguaggio proprio della città che scrive e riscrive costantemente parti, configurandola come un palinsesto. La città si narra all’osservatore fruitore dei suoi spazi esterni il quale ne recepisce i messaggi attraverso i sensi e li rielabora mediante i filtri mentali traducendoli in percezioni. Nella città contemporanea si percepisce un senso di disorientamento che provoca preoccupazioni, ansie, paure, in una parola “tensioni”. Le ragioni di questo disagio vanno ricercate anche negli effetti della globalizzazione che ha creato uno squilibrio tra virtuale e reale, tra globale e locale, introducendo frammenti discontinui di globalità nei quartieri, esasperando le paure e le diffidenze e consolidando differenze, esclusioni e segregazioni., Territorio della Ricerca su Insediamenti e Ambiente. Rivista internazionale di cultura urbanistica, No 7 (2011): The Languages of the City