A battle lasting decades to free an exceptional archaeological area ends with the demolition of the buildings built 120 years ago. A 23 million euro plan for the entire historic center
The moment has come and solemn. This afternoon in Teramo the construction site will be opened for the demolition of Palazzo Adamoli and Palazzo Salvoni, the two three-storey buildings built one hundred and twenty years ago right above the Roman Theater, in the historic center. The two buildings will finally be demolished and the greatest archaeological asset in Abruzzo, a marvelous stone work of the Augustan age built by the emperor Hadrian in the second century after Christ, will see the light again within 150 days.
Coeval of the most famous Teatro Marcello in Rome, the Roman theater of ancient Interamnia it was capable of holding a thousand people and was there, whole, three and a half meters below the road surface, when it was decided to build the two buildings on it, right in the center of the hemicycle, implying that there was nothing down there. A thesis, this, also reiterated when, in 1902, the historian and archaeologist from Teramo Francesco Savini insisted on affirming the opposite, and again repeated when Savini (to whom the Archaeological Museum of Teramo was deservedly entitled) not only did not give up, but with tenacity he began the excavations at his own expense, which then continued thanks to the approval of his project by the Accademia dei Lincei and the financing of the then Superintendency of Marche, Abruzzo and Dalmatia.
In 1937, the Minister of Popular Culture, Giuseppe Bottai, did the right thing. He decides that those two buildings must disappear and finances its demolition. The Fascist regime, in Rome, by demolishing and digging, is bringing to light the Imperial Forums, and in Teramo it does not want to be outdone. Then the war breaks out. And, after the war, there are other ruins to which to devote attention and resources. But after? What happened later, in the three twenty-year-olds post-war reconstruction, that is, in those sixty years of wild construction that from 1960 to 2020 disfigured Italy in various ways? Very little. Almost nothing. Some demolished eco-monsters – like the Fuenti hotel on the Amalfi coast, or the palazzacci of Punta Perotti on the Bari seafront -, and the rest of the architectural and urban Great Ugliness still standing.
For the Roman Theater of Teramo things went in the same direction. After the scar, the neglect. And after the mistrust, inertia and resignation. We realized it eleven years ago, when the Corriere came to Teramo and gave voice to a handful of diehards – the Teramo Nostra association and the Radicals from Teramo Marco Pannella -, who had never stopped fighting and believed in the recovery of the Roman Theater and in its function as a flywheel for the relaunch of everything around it: the Roman Domus of the first century BC, the Amphitheater of the first century later Christ, the Basilica of the sixth century and the Cathedral of the twelfth. It seemed an impossible challenge, one of pure testimony. Indeed, after the 2009 earthquake, which made the Adamoli and Salvoni buildings unsafe, due to an incorrect demolition project, the money that had to be used to demolish the two buildings was used to consolidate them.
Marco Pannella, angry, exhausted, denounces these oddities to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which he defined as the result of the will of a criminal association that pursues the same criminal design. But nothing happened. However, Pannella would have won this battle too. In 2019, three years after his death. When the municipal administration of Gianguido D’Alberto settles in Teramo, the mayor in office, who decides to gamble everything on the recovery of the Roman Theater and on the re-functionalization, as he defines it, of the surrounding archaeological area, up to the covered market and at the Braga Conservatory.
The two buildings were acquired by the owners for 400 thousand euros and the actual demolition will cost 800 thousand, but overall 23 million will be spent on the restoration and enhancement of the historic center of Teramo of Euro. We will have a beautiful new cityscape, which we will be proud of, says the mayor.
D’Alberto’s enthusiasm and emotion are the same as those of the engineer Alessandra di Giuseppe Caf, who will coordinate the demolition work, and of Alberto Melarangelo, president of the municipal council and son of Sandro, who, with Renato Cimin, Piero Chiarini, Cosima Pagano and Alessio Palantrani of Teramo Nostra, in protest he came to chain himself in front of the buildings that will be demolished today. But enthusiasm and emotion are also the feelings of the entire city. All the political forces have supported the individual stages of the fast journey of the last three years and the citizens have responded with an unprecedented participation in the services conference last year, in which the recovery project of the Palermo architect Girolamo Bellomo and of his team.
The demolition, for obvious reasons, it will not happen in a spectacular way, with dynamite, but with the disassembly piece by piece, starting from the roof, of the two buildings. As is done with Lego building bricks. The two buildings will be harnessed by side chains that will avoid bulging, while the steps and the auditorium of the Theater will be cleaned of the deposit material of the false foundations. For Teramo, which after three earthquakes in the last twelve years still has four thousand displaced people, this is a really great day.
December 19, 2021 (change December 19, 2021 | 20:59)
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