Naming Places. The Monumental Structure of the City

It is the monuments that make a city a specific reality. There are many churches but there is only one Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna. Monuments are not mere buildings but places, whose nature manifests fully only in their relationship with the city. Through monuments – considered as city landmarks – the Italian tradition of urban studies has been able to establish the relationship between permanency and transformation, avoiding both the quandaries of a conservative stance and the superficiality of the avantgarde’s tabula rasa approach.In this manner, the correspondence between city and architecture has been determined, so that a city can be described and represented through a list of its churches, monasteries, stately homes, towers and gates that delimit the parts of which it is composed. And at that point drawing becomes a knowledge tool to undertake urban planning as an “art of discovery”. Like people, monuments have a given name, a name which expresses their raison d’être within the history of the city and ties the work of architecture to the vicissitudes of individuals.