Piazzetta Don Bruno Falloni

Between tradition and innovation. The Puglia region is a wondrous place: bathed in sun, sharp, all in blueness. The Mediterranean sun strongly influences and defines locations. The nature is characterized by white calcareous rocks which intensify the colors of the sky and sea on the horizon. Places, towns and villages bathed in sun are morphologically and typologically related to a glorious architecture, which is part of the history of the Mediterranean basin. Miletus, Ghardaia, the Greek and Croatian coasts, all are recognizable in their urban interventions. Monteiasi is situated in the centre of the region, in the vicinity of Taranto and several kilometers from the Ionian Sea, between Taranto and place called Grottaglie (the town of caves and ceramics). The heart of the inhabited part of Monteiasi, Piazza Falloni, is an urban intersection, surrounded by the main public and private buildings of this little town: il Palazzo Ducale (Ducal Palace), the building of the former Municipio (former municipality) and the central church. The square is terse: two hundred and fifty square meters bordered by constructed tissue. This is a form of urbanism of open internal spaces, a composition of courtyards – cortile in an urban constructed tissue, typically southern, which is almost introvert in its character. Before the recent redesign intervention by Maurizio Bradaschia, the square was in a state of unstoppable degradation. Open to vehicular traffic, the square was covered with a kind of patchwork of different paving, deteriorated over time, there was random greenery and a non-homogenous system of illumination. During 2005, the municipal management decided to initiate the reconstruction of the town's historic centre and as the beginning of this project, they decide exactly on Falloni Square, the very symbol of the centre, the square that is also faced by the former Municipio headquarters. The competition was won by Studio Bradaschia from Trieste and they decided on collaboration, on the very site, with Studio Netti Valente from Bari. The idea of the renovation project of this part of town is very simple: to redesign space, make it unique, create a pedestrian zone and thus create a place for stopping in the sense of the historical function of the very space. The chosen language for redefinition of this space expertly moves between tradition and innovation , thus creating a contemporary space in historic continuity of the place – a space that can capture and transfer atmosphere, emotion. Due to the space's constricted nature, the designers decided on a design determined by pavement textures. They wanted to emphasize the location itself by only few elements: a central "carpet", delimited merely by a small green islet on which a tree-symbol grows, a Holm oak, a typical tree For Mediterranean coasts (Italian, Croatian, Dalmatian, French, Spanish and even Greek); and a spot for sitting, a bench, which would bring back memories of a place where the townspeople used to meet, sit outside to discuss politics and other things, characteristic of the life of small communities before the arrival of television; and finally the introduction of ceramics, the local craft, the material produced on the spot, small tiles of green ceramics to enrich the central "carpet" of the square. Minimalist illumination – which should underline the chromatics and volume of the empty, or rather, the emptiness (the square, porch, urban space) – complete the project. It is a poetic project which shows us that we can significantly improve the everyday places of our existence with small interventions, drawn from familiar vocabulary.