Sensitive body and seismic shocks: San Pio da Pietrelcina Parish Complex, Rome, by Anselmi &Associati

This article offers an experiential and phenomenological reading of the San Pio da Pietrelcina Parish Complex in Rome (2010), designed by Studio Anselmi & Associati, interpreting the building as a spatial device capable of generating empathic responses. Through a first-person narrative grounded in embodied perception, the essay investigates how architecture mediates emotional resonance, memory, and sensory awareness. Light, materiality, sound, thresholds, and spatial sequencing are analysed not as formal attributes but as relational instruments that shape the interaction between body and space. Drawing on phenomenological aesthetics and theories of embodied cognition, the text frames empathy as an emergent condition arising from movement, orientation, and affective engagement rather than from symbolic representation. The church is read as a place of transition and attentiveness, where architectural form fosters states of listening, suspension, and care. In doing so, the article argues for an understanding of architecture as an empathic practice—one that privileges perception, vulnerability, and presence, and that repositions design as an ethical act rooted in lived experience.