Abstract
Abstract. The ruined convent of Santa Chiara, a nodal urban space connecting three historic quarters of Cagliari, has had a key role in the urban life of the city since medieval age. After the suppression of the mendicant orders in 1864 and the violent bombings during the World War II, this monument become a neglected and ruined shell of masonry with no roofs and floors, losing its central role. Several interventions for its conversion as temporal local market and the following restoration and integration works have contributed to stratify these structures nowadays not accessible but valuable benchmarks for reconstructing the history and evolution of the fabric, still unclear. Starting from the archival and bibliographic investigations, then a geomatics and archaeometric investigations of the fabric have allowed to understand and study the building’s forms, geometries, materials, developments, and chronologies. They have also permitted to recognise characteristic features or anomalies, structural morphology, and other structural issues, significant for the definition of sustainable project of reuse.
Highlights
The paper presents the ruined convent of Santa Chiara as case study included in a wider research on ruined architectures placed in rural and urban contexts at the international scale (1) (Pilia, 2019)
This research stems from the unresolved debate around the complexity of these fragmented and misunderstood structures, the difficulty concerning their interpretation and the consequent controversial practical modalities nowadays designed for their preservation and reuse
The monumental complex does not present any material impediment to the surveys, its geometrical complexity, the presence of different levels and macroscopic structural anomalies as well as the numerous stratigraphies discovered during a first traditional topographic survey, led to the decision to support geometric knowledge with the greater accuracy provided by Terrestrial Laser Scanner techniques (TLS) and GPS survey
Summary
The paper presents the ruined convent of Santa Chiara as case study included in a wider research on ruined architectures placed in rural and urban contexts at the international scale (1) (Pilia, 2019). Allowed a comparative investigation between the Anglo-Saxon and Italian contexts, arriving at defining an integrated methodology where ruins are investigated in strict connection with their context, and the understanding of their geometry, materials, techniques and technologies supporting the assessment of values and significance of these architectures for their respectful interventions - conservation or integration - and enhancement The protocol experimented both on rural (Fiorino, et al, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2014, 2017; Pilia et al, 2016) and urban ruins (Fiorino, et al, 2017; Giannattasio et al, 2013), finds here its application on the urban ruined conventual complex of Santa Chiara, chosen for its strategic position into the historical core (Pilia, 2017)
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