Drawing to Reconstruct. The Convent of Santa Maria della Sanità

The sixteenth-century convent of Santa Maria della Sanità in Napoli, designed by the Dominican friar Giuseppe Nuvolo (1570-1643) and documented in the plan of the early eighteenth century by the friar Angelico Majorino, is the object of study. The convent, built on Capodimonte’s hill tuff bank stone, consti-tutes a singular spatial integration between artifact and nature since the conven-tual environments were designed based on the orography and often dug out of the tuff. The convent was partially destroyed during the French decade for the con-struction of the Sanità bridge (1806-09), which involved the demolition of the upper cloister and the adjoining rooms as well as tampering with the ovate-shaped lower cloister. The research was developed on the basis of previous studies by Alfredo Buc-caro, for the systematic collection of sources on the Sanità district (1991), and Ornella Zerlenga, for the first research on the original structure of the convent of Santa Maria della Sanità (1991) and, subsequently, the geometric tracing of the ovate cloister (1992). Through the architectural survey carried out in the years 2018-19 the location, the articulation and the connections of the different rooms were investigated based on the orographic configuration. The original architectural configuration was restored through digital modeling and visualization. The research have today the survey of the convent of Santa Maria della Sanità and the representation of the original context.