Fondare e ri-fondare Parma, Reggio e Modena lungo la via Emilia romana

What is the meaning today of wondering about the origins of the city, in the sense of a community place which we inhabit and belong to, and especially its future, which each of us personally contributes to? The foundation of a city, whether through a single act or a combination of more or less contemporary factors, surely speaks to us of the necessary terms of the urban realization, thereby establishing the city’s forms before its being. At the same time, however, the founding act can never be considered complete and is indeed continuously relived, regenerating itself in that process of transformation which interprets the city’s subsequent demands down the centuries. Hence the notion of an origin which becomes an instrument to characterize the becoming of the city, where the founding fact is followed by the historical (dis)continuity of the re-founding one. The answer cannot therefore be resolved merely at the fact-finding level of archaeology, i.e. the discovery of the origin in the depths of an ancient era to which a large part of Italian and European cities belong. To grasp, but especially to measure, the lasting sense of the origin it will therefore be necessary to turn to a historical phenomenology of the re-foundation of the city, also through disparate kinds of knowledge united by their curiosity in constructing urban identity. At 2,200 years from their foundation, Parma, Reggio Emilia, and Modena, but indeed the entire system of Roman cities along the poleogenetic axis of the Via Aemilia, offer a limited but very significant terrain for the application of this heterodox reading of the meaning and use of the urban origin, between knowledge and design.