Regium Vertigo
Dealing with the idea of the water front, of a sea promenade in Italy, means to reject the word ‘waterfront’, that generalizes every place set by the sea, refusing somehow its specificity and identity.
The sea front has two specific problems:
– the relationship with the water, its horizon
– what is located behind it, the city, with its complexity and contradictions, that in the past made the true rule played by the sea as a destination, dream and magic, got lost or/and distorted.
If the city is Reggio Calabria, then, everything gets a heroic and mythological meaning at the same time. The way you get to Reggio and to the sea is like a conquest from the earth, somehow looming over the Strait, rather than from the sea, where the most intense suggestion is the sense of transit, from the North to the South, from the East to the West.
In such an environment, the feelings are of a space to be regained rather than delineated, to be connected rather than split even if in singular episodes.
The heroism of a luxurious and unexpected green area. The sense of vertigo produced by the invention of a level zero, that from above confronts itself with the horizon, with the Other Coast.
Heroism. Vertigo. Identity.