Old city New buildings Architecture and urban landscape in XV century italian cities

Having founded a civilisation, on the one hand based on the urban phenomena of the city and, on the other, based on a relationship of symbiosis with the landscape is a peculiarity that certainly is not exclusively Italian, but in this country, for a series of reasons, it has assumed unmistakable importance. The dualistic relationships of building/city and city/countryside have defined, over time, the contents of a principle of identity within which, beyond political contingencies, the inhabitants of small and large centres alike have identified themselves. The attention to context, whether it be natural or artificial, structures the idea of this temporal continuity: this essay propose an analysis of some of its various architectural declinations: the relationship between buildings in the changing and layered city, between the city and its parts and between the city and the landscape. This text, which refers to the title of a well known book by Gustavo Giovannoni, is concentrated on the relationship architecture and context within the relationship between old city and new architecture. This is accidentally presented here in a historical key: it looks at the 15th and 16th centuries, because it is during this the period that this relationship, as a result of the experiments made by painters, architects and writers assumes, for the first time, a complete form and, above all, one which is still today of great reference and value.27833