Reintegrare per recuperare: il caso della Rocca Caetani a Trevi nel Lazio

With a residential vocation, the “Caetani Castle” of Trevi in Lazio, -Roman town hall mentioned by Plinio the Old in his work “Naturalis Historia”- like other ones of medieval origin spread in the lower Lazio, joins with the ancient inhabited village occupying the higher part of it and becoming the standing out architectonical element. Its history is strictly connected with history of its region which, apart from the geographic doubts about definite limits, in ancient times, after the period of Roman modelling, had been theatre of complex events where the Church and the numerous southern institutions had been the protagonists. At the end of the seventies only the external walls, partly tumbled down, and the “mastio” in the centre of the court had remained of the ancient building with tower and residential bodies: a real ruin partially choked by incongruous actions of private building. The restoration, started during the second half of the following ten-year period, was due to the demand of giving the fortress new functions compatible with its originary vocation. Placing in its inside a visitor centre for the Simbruini Mountain National Park with the archaeological Museum of the high valley of the Aniene, has meant for the designers to accept the challenge of a partial restoration to recreate some rooms of the ancient “palatium” and to redesign the vertical and horizontal connections, at the outside of the enclosure wall and at the inside of the free residential wings, of the court and of the “mastio”. On one hand the firm reconstruction of building structures in a not mimetic way, on the other one the exhibition of a technical nature of resistant systems of the new inserted elements -ramps, stairs, flights, etc.- oriented to a great use of steel, are some elements of a project which combines a right “philological” attitude - even though developed in a “brutalista” way - with a demand of a link with the pre-existent elements managed by a modern one. The “steel in tension” becomes the characterizing stylistic element of this action and it strongly points out its different technical “nature” compared to that one of the ancient monument. These suggested notes, beginning from the elements of the fortress, its history, the history of a city where it has been the main defensive garrison for centuries and the land around it, want to point out the significant elements of the project in their conceptual and technical nature with reference to the typical manners in the present architectonical culture - in particular the Italian one - where it is asked for answers about the always present subject of the connection between old and new.