The Wall: Roman Republic Constitution Memorial

Rome, Italy

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Other Projects by Annalaura Spalla Architecture Firm

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Mazzini Memorial at the Opera Theatre

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The Revolution of 1848 Memorial

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Small town making: the recostruction of Cavallerizzo

The Wall: Roman Republic Constitution Memorial

Rome, Italy

Firm

Annalaura Spalla Architecture Firm

Type

Cultural › Memorial

YEAR

2011

Memorial dedicated to the Roman Republic Constitution and one of the six Memorials designed for the “Places of Memory” Intervention Program.

At the Gianicolo in Rome we read the text of the Constitution of the Roman Republic in 1849 looking at the city skyline. And we read it walking.
The Memorial is a monolith in colored concrete fifty meters long with engraved sixty-nine Articles of the Constitution. The concrete is rose red color as the colors in the city view.

The visual space of the Wall is a continuous surface made of letters with different depths of text. The Articles of the Constitution form the unified space of the skin of the monolith, the large letters " Costituzione della Repubblica Romana 1849" are out of scale and become footprint and pages of a book oversized.

The New Memorials of the Italian Unification are public spaces in which to live memory, comfortable and pleasant places of everyday life. Public places that sell a commercial brand atypical, in which you do not consume objects but you consume memory.
A place of memory is not a private altar, is an emotional place in which personal identity is related with collective identity situated in time and in history.

The Civic City is the place where, out of your own home, you experience the belonging to a community and where it is recognized the role and importance of those who live it. In these places It can exist the social dimension of belonging that leads the individual it in the collective memory through an individual experience.

This project is one of the six memorials that I could design for the Celebration of Italian Unification in Genoa, Turin , Pisa and Rome. This work is been an opportunity to reflect about identity against the city of not belonging, about how to make public spaces in the contemporary city unknowable and little public . And perhaps unknowable because little public.