L'Ospizio Marino di Trapani. Un secolo di storia della costruzione

The paper deals with the topic of knowledge, aimed at conscious recovery interventions, for the case study of the “R. Sieri Pepoli” Marine Hospice and Children's Hospital, in Trapani, designed by Giuseppe Manzo, the same one of the “Serraino Vulpitta” sanatorium and the psychiatric hospital, in Trapani. The building, used until 2016 for social purposes (marine colony, orphanage, retirement home, center for non-EU citizens), is now abandoned. Through the direct archival analysis of documents, mostly unpublished, a century of its construction history, from the original project of 1907, to subsequent interventions up to the current state is retraced. The building shows the typical techniques of load-bearing masonry constructions, iron floors with "tufo" vaults and wooden roofs from the early 1900s, those of the 1950s with the first r.c. works up to the indiscriminate use of r.c. for lintels, overhangs and curbs for hollow bricks floors in the 1980s replacing the existing ones. The location of the building, on a small island, required different technological devices to avoid rising damp, such as the creation of a ventilated basement and reinforced concrete foundations waterproofed with asphalt, as well as the use of pozzolanic aggregates-based mortar for the joints of the masonry. The current conditions of the Marine Hospice, which still retains some original features, impose critical study on the recovery interventions and reuse with functions compatible with the peculiarities of the building and environmental conditions.