STUDY FOR THE REUSE OF NEGLECTED CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES IN THE HISTORICAL CENTRE OF PALERMO

Palermo, a harbour city always involved in active commercial trades, maintains traces of its past in the historical centre, whose current image, though markedly run down, still reminds of the ancient busy and flourishing markets. The most relevant but probably the most neglected of these traces is the congregational churches heritage. It is a group of churches built in the XVI and XVII centuries by Confraternities, workers associations from all over Italy who concentrated in small-defined city areas or Logge and brought with them their own patron saint. Each Confraternity consecrated to these saints the construction of her church and the whole of them constitutes a rich art sign because of the marked analogy of their style features. Unfortunately, the same analogy can be identified in their common destiny: due to changes in the needs by the modern parishes, to the progressive emptying of the historical centre, but even more to the wounds inflicted by world war II bombings, these churches are currently in a state of ruin and they are often used as gardens, warehouses, stables or garbage dumps. In the present work a systematic investigation, implemented with the aid of original archive documents and in situ surveys, of this class of churches is described, with the aim of establishing the analytical bases to confer them new life within an overall reuse project. The objective is establishing a network of services for the historical centre inhabitants. Because of their generally small sizes, often with joined service rooms, different destinations are compatible with the studied architectonic type: family counselling clinics, immigration centres, afterschool and cultural sites, etcetera. The reuse project, endorsing a novel social aspect, takes a dual objective into account: both the single church-node, and the artistic and functional connection between the nodes and the network are considered.