Nola. The joyful resilient community. Memory and metamorphosis of a city moving slow towards the future

To define architecture in its consistency as the environment in which man lives, we have to be convinced that it is subject to a constant and slow ’functional adaptation’ of what we define as ’built space’. Living architecture is therefore the compromise between the comfort dimension and the material consistency of the space, both what semiology calls ’meaning’ and the more extensive of ’urban trace’. The latter would be read by scientific literature as the sum of the architectural outside spaces. The singular case of the city of Nola, which hosts in its urban space the living scenography of ’Festa dei Gigli’ celebration – suggestive and engaging popular epiphany inscribed in 2013 by UNESCO in the Intangible Heritage List – appears as an interesting experience through which it is possible to read the small and constant changes that an urban space undergoes. Secular modifications of windows that widen with the reduction of the railing and the creation of stone shelves to create balconies that resemble theater boxes transforming the entire public space of the city into a theater. Micro interventions that reconfigure the city into a theater where, on the occasion of the celebration of the Patron Saint, the community by staging itself, its aspect of resilient city is highlighted which, jealously, preserves its ’know-how’, documenting them also in the technical expertise of the construction of Gigli wooden obelisk.