Re-use and enhancing planning of the "madness spaces". Memory and Future of the Royal House of Lunatics in Aversa

After their ope legis closure, Italian psychiatric hospitals have driven studies and cultural undertaking shaped around the recognition of their memorial values, material and intangible. Albeit impeded by damnatio memoriae traditionally addressed to such “memory places” of pain, their role as present key factors into socioeconomic sustainability vision cannot be denied, at least for the vastity of the premises. Despite hard states of degradation frequently occured there, the need of their re-using like both “places of memory” and “commons” has been becoming recurrent amid academics and sociocultural organizations. Their preserving and enhancing through meditated, compatible integrated design of new uses is indeed of great relevance today, due to multiple sociocultural, political and economic implications thus involved. Some re-functionalization works carried out in Milan’s “Paolo Pini”, Trieste’s St. John, in Maggiano, Volterra and Rome (S. Mary of Piety) help us highlight common major problems in this regard. Although not properly preservative like architectural experiences, all these works chose public multipurpose functions to coordinate free accessibility to the parks with psychiatric and outpatient services and sociocultural and entertaining uses, also resorting to limited commercial-productive activities, thus contributing to the sites partial auto financing. Following this path, the study dealt with the preservation, enhancement and reuse design (masterplan) of the Royal House of Lunatics in Aversa, a multi-layered cluster of fabrics of diverse typology and dating within wide green spaces, founded in 1813 into the former Franciscan monastery of S. Mary Magdalen. (M.D.)