Identity and regenerated landscape - An opportunity for the 'new' paper mill-museum in Tivoli.

The former Amicucci-Parmegiani paper mill is a publicly-owned building in the historic center of Tivoli: long abandoned and dilapidated, it has recently been the subject of a design competition for its recovery. It belongs to a wide system of previous industrial paper mill settlements located along the Aniene river, due to availability of water; nowaday they are abandoned and testify to the stratification of a productive activity in a place inhabited since Roman antiquity. The strategy of New European Bauhaus regarding the aim to create a new approach to old, the case of study, developed through an activity of a Sapienza Startup, is a notable sample to a new approach about renewing, repairing and rebuilding the built modern heritage. With dwindling resources, it has become necessary to listen to and work with the history of the buildings rather than discard it: if we accept that each generation has the right to work with what it inherits, adapting that legacy to the conditions of use of current times, then it must also be accepted that the materiality and history, the physical and emotional weight of what is inherited can resist certain design decisions. Guided by these principles, an integrated conservative intervention strategy has been studied to preserve the industrial identity of the building, enhancing its productive characteristics with a functional programme that involves citizenship and tells the story of the Paper Mill and its industrial processes through a museum, triggering a virtuous cycle of growth, development and landscape restoration. A landscape belonging to a current ‘drosscape’ has the opportunity to push a renovation of a piece of city. The actions of demolition of the existing heritage are triggered by the opportunity to initiate processes of economic valorisation: the case of the former paper mill represents a unicum, since the faculty of demolition - sanctioned by the constraint placed on the area and on the building - has the objective of constructing, through a complex action of demolition and a reduced activity of reconstruction, the common value of a "new urban landscape", in an area of extraordinary quality. In a framework of shrinking public resources, the value of recovering the existing heritage - specifically a fragment of industrial archaeology - represents an opportunity to validate the conservative choice over the hypothesis of building replacement, with respect to social environmental and economic variables.