A Personal Perception of the Geography of the Messina Strait. From the Engravings of Saint-Non to a Project for the Metropolitan City

Abstract

Reggio Calabria today, as with the entire area of the Strait of Messina involved in the recent project of the Metropolitan City, has nothing in common with the city represented in the engravings of Voyage Pittoresque of Saint-Non. Protagonist in the imaginary geographies of the Voyage, as well as in the personal geographies of its inhabitants ‒ it can now be described metaphorically as a kind of Calvinian Pentesilea running along 32 kilometers of coastline facing the Strait of Messina. It is necessary, therefore, to identify new design paths that can foreshadow a collective project able to update and renew sedimented symbolic values and the sense of belonging of local communities. All this is required to transform the “places of the soul” of the Metropolitan Area of the Strait in advanced scenarios of integration, protection, use and local development, as well as elements of the real morphological qualification of the territory and examples of how the wealth of “objects of nature and history “which are an integral part of the environment can be transformed into a wealth of “subjects of culture” interacting in the territory. They are subjects of culture, having an imaginative force like the engravings of Saint Non, able to redesign the personal perception of geography made up of “city-territory-landscape understood as spaces of social life, as a creation of civilization and as a promise of democracy”.