Sustainable project for the ruins in the consolidated city. The case of the convent of Sant'Antonio da Padova

Since 2011, UNESCO has defined the concept of Historical Urban Landscape as an area determined by historical stratifications of cultural and natural values that include not only the historic center but a wider urban context. The Urban Landscape Recommendation of 2011 considers the growth of the city also from this heritage and its vulnerability. Within this landscape are often found abandoned buildings or ruins, symbols and spaces of a past that the contemporary city must give back to the community as an added value and as a possibility of sustainable development. The architectural project must rethink the ruin in a contemporary key, the reuse with new functions. The themes of recovery today require careful and targeted choices: the project must enhance the ruin, improve the ways of perception and learning of its cultural value and increase the public use. In this sense, interventions are closely linked to social and economic factors. The case study is a former Franciscan convent, the convent of St Anthony of Padua, built in Scicli, in the province of Ragusa, Sicily, in 1514. It is located in a peripheral area of the town and it was once in the open countryside. It is in a state of ruin but it preserves intact a sixteenth-century chapel, one of the rare elements arrived to us, after the earthquake of 1693. In addition to the important cultural value, this building has great potential to revive the fate of the local economy, in a sustainable and innovative key. The research, through the analysis and history of some similar cases (castles and ruins of various kinds), intends to propose actions of transformation, integration and improvement of the potential of these places to offer spaces of aggregation for the community, of social and economic sustainability, of rethinking the public space.