Looks to the future and has roots in the past

Strenna d’agosto 2016

Luigi Frudà, Sebastiano Costantino

There is a time in life when memories win out over the present, and reason opens up and adapts itself to the imaginary, to the fairy-tale and to the primacy of feelings.

It is the time for taking stock, for new horizons, new hierarchies, new aesthetic experiences: stopping in order to move forward. Stopping to reflect, so as to bear witness to one’s own life and to redesign, with lightness, irony and serenity too, the journey still to be made and the course to be followed.

Every journey has a destination and a horizon, and the teachers of one’s life, the gift of the friends one has had so far and of those who will join along the way, will make the road light and joyful.

Specus Corallii. An architecture that looks to the future and has deep roots in the past

Luigi Frudà, Sebastiano Costantino

Trapani has recently gained a new jewel in its historic centre. In 2016, the work of restoration and complete architectural redesign of a very old and historic building in Via Generale Domenico Giglio 12, a few steps from the Cattedrale di San Lorenzo Martire, was completed. A place long abandoned, which in the last century had served as the oratory space for the Cathedral’s youth. At the initiative of Father Gaspare Gruppuso and the Pastoral Council of the Parish of San Lorenzo, a project for the full rebirth and reuse of the building was set in motion. The professional skill and intelligence of the architect Antonino Cardillo did the rest, together with the talent and local “genius” of a team of people and professionals whose names are recorded, one by one, in the history of Trapani in an elegant presentation booklet of the work, curated and written by Cardillo himself. To him the task of articulating the project’s conceptual, symbolic, identity‑forming and forward‑looking key, the key to this new jewel that adorns and enriches Trapani.

The Coral Cave is a refuge from the world. A grotto where love can still happen. The place where the city regains its sacral dimension that binds those who were to those who are. The Coral Cave explores a pre-modern idea: when architecture was imagination and the city was the labyrinth of memory. That labyrinth renewed every day with the caresses of our eyes; that speaks to us, mutedly, of lives lived. The image is the place where the dead speak to the living. Where it confirms the idea of life as permanence and tradition. Without this silent dialogue, the city dies; entertainment and alienation take over neutralizing the subversive potential of love.

The Coral Cave speaks of the sacred that comes from the sea. The cadence of space recounts the allegories of beauty and metamorphosis imaged from shells evoked by the sediments of the stone base, and corals, to whose willowy asperities alludes the pink perpendicular vault. Shells and corals populate the imagery of the town of Trapani. The story of the arrival of the Madonna from the sea and the carved stones of her sanctuary reveal how, along with the tradition of corals, the theme of the shell is a fundamental myth of the sacredness of the city.

The colour and tactile surfaces of the Specus rediscover the sensuality of the stone and dust that speak of the place and the bowels of the earth where they were carved. Thus Specus Corallii, with its evocation of a mysterious underwater dimension, relates that imaginary which, from the sea, has sedimented for millennia the sense of the life of the city and its landscape.

The Coral Cave looks like an antique oratory. The classic configuration of its architecture, a rectangle governed by the ‘silver ratio’, makes it available for different uses and interpretations; preventing the dominance of function and technology, always casual and transitory pretexts for architecture, from bringing about the obsolescence of the work.