From nature to the city and back: the case of Piazzale Clodio, Rome

On the basis of complex urban realities that time dissolves into fragments, now punctual into the consolidated fabrics, now confined to the broken margins without coherence or dialectic with the sourroundings, it is difficult to image the city as an unified organism, alive, able to adapt to changing needs of society as nature. The task becomes more difficult in the analysis of development of a city like Rome and in specific reading of the area named Quartiere delle Vittorie, so much rooted in the collective imagination cause its history and unique morphology, recognizable due to the typical starry path signed by a controversial planning and to its relations with Quartiere Prati and Trionfale. A part of modern city, still incomplete. The urban fabric is adapting to a geometric matrix of linear paths, no orthogonal, converging towards the highest hill of the city: Monte Mario. They stop in front of orography, not comparing with the territory. There is not a pole to mark a fitting end to a design planned, but only an undefined area, degraded in the use and in the physical state, as the landscape around Piazzale Clodio. In a more general urban regeneration project it appears not only to architecture as a social art, able to reconnect communities, places and nature, but also as a process, in the reverse direction, which completes the anthropical realty from natural context, defining a unique landscape, that like every other living organism challenges its own limits, becoming into a continuous evolution.