Counter-Geography of the sacred. Submerged architectures of islamic worship in contemporary Rome

According to data from the Ministry of the Interior (2016), Italy counts 1,251 Islamic places of worship, yet only four are formally recognised as mosques. In Rome, a 2017 survey recorded more than 100 worship spaces, many of which operate in precarious and unofficial conditions: environments adapted for religious use, devoid of architectural quality, and often located at the city’s margins or within its invisible interstices. Despite their informality, these spaces function as devices of belonging and resistance: thresholds through which diasporic communities reinscribe themselves into the body of the city. However, the absence of a defined architectural form – the denial of a figure – produces a symbolic subtraction, an exclusion that no longer operates at the juridical level but at the aesthetic and ontological one. Architecture, in this sense, becomes an instrument of citizenship: what lacks recognition in form is excluded from collective memory, from the urban narrative, and from the regime of visibility (Bourdieu, 1993; Arendt, 1958). This contribution proposes a mapping of invisible worship spaces, outlining a counter- geography of negated sites and analysing how their distribution has influenced new vectors of urban expansion, contributing to diffuse and unprecedented morphologies within the contemporary city. Where official mosques are absent, it is these silent presences that orient urban growth – by negation or by adaptation. The aim is not to design new mosques, but rather to reveal – in the Foucauldian sense – the invisible structures of the sacred that already inhabit the city. Architectural intervention is thus conceived as a form of urban microsurgery: a precise, situated practice capable of restoring dignity to marginal spaces through the conscious use of absolute elements – light as epiphany, matter as memory, symbol as a form of collective resonance. From this perspective, architecture becomes an act of care and recognition: a gesture that renders visible what the city has repressed, and that restores to these negated worship spaces their full status as places of being, where body, time, and belonging are reconciled within space.