Piazza Dante Alighieri, photo by Ty Richardson.
From the beginning of our project in
Pienza, the transformation of Piazza Dante Alighieri has been among the priority considerations. Positioned between the historic Centro and the 20th-century town, Piazza Dante Alighieri occupies an important strategic location – a hinge or connector, the threshold to the Centro – and presents one of Pienza’s best opportunities for improving public space. Its current design and function could and should perform at a much higher level. Later in this book, several of the landscape architecture students present new, visionary schemes for remaking Piazza Dante Alighieri as a
contemporary public space. In terms of conservation, our supportive analysis is meant to underpin these designs. The conservation question regarding the piazza is how to sort the features and functions warranting protection as the entire space is subject to transformative thinking. How might the re-designs be grounded in ways appropriate to the historic character of this edge of the town? Applying cultural landscape preservation concepts, it became clear that the focus should be on retaining certain historical processes and spatial relationships, but little of the fabric itself. Deep historical analysis of the piazza
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