Trapani Marina

Trapani. During the XII century, after the Arab domination, whose only architectural contribution received to us remains the urban mosaic of the Casalicchio district, outside city’s walls many small islands that studded the landscape between the sky and the western sea were about to be settled by the houses of the consulates and the crusaders. This unique human landscape can only be reconstructed through imagination. To date, there are no descriptions, let alone images. However, some residues persist in the current city: there is a place built by earth tongues extended on the water, a sort of bridges, a little natural, a little artificial: they give access to the buildings of the Lazzaretto, Villino Nasi, and Torre di Ligny, which echos, a little more in the, a rocky strip marked in its eastern end by that strange construction, a temporal mine of spaces and signs, which the inhabitants of the city still call Colombaia, a dark resonance of the local myth of the Venus Erycina and its white doves.

Un’architettura sulla marina di Trapani: Let There Be More Light / aquarium (pdf), thesis, Università di Palermo, March 2002, p. 5.