In Naples it's easy to come across buildings like this. Some of them show one or more walled windows, as well as the entrances. But this building seems to be a single block of tuff worked so as to appear as a place that was then, intentionally, made inaccessible. For about sixty meters, in this small portion of the city, there is an extraordinary visual stratification composed of three elements; a long strip of asphalt dense with cracks, a box made of many tuff bricks and a sky that curves together with the road and that mysterious and melancholic urban object. That path is a sort of portal towards the northern outskirts of the city. Less than a kilometer later, and always on the same strip of asphalt, it is possible to witness a certain kind of degradation that I don't think has any comparison among the other suburbs of any Western European city.

#Naples #urbanvoid

An urban void in Naples is ever really (and only) an unused city space. It would be more accurate to say that, in Naples, a disused space is an open wound surrounded by pulsating life that, by difference, produces a kind of vibration. The void in Naples can be felt, and it can be observed. Ruined buildings next to concrete skeletons that have never been completed coexist without any real boundary with newly inaugurated blocks of flats and public places. But also barbed wire and gates worn by rust to delimit places without any function other than that of filling the landscape with their presence.

#Naples #urbanvoid