I luoghi delle feste, dall’architettura alla città

The place where feasts and celebrations take place changes over time, depending on the nature and character of the occasion. From a typological point of view, feast halls originate within the private sphere of houses, villas, and palaces. Hence the Festhallen typology, which is characterised by the presence of a large empty central space, mostly without bearing supports. The common character of these covered places is the delimitation of an inner space, which stands autonomous with respect to the city. Urban space represents, on the other hand, another place appointed to stage the collective moment of a community. Since ancient times, the streets, roads, and squares of the historical city have at certain moments become the site of public events of various kinds. Thanks to provisional setups, the physical space of the real city becomes the setting for temporary events, as experienced by the various trends and avant-gardes of the 1970s. Hence installations which transform for a moment the reality of urban space into a stage setting where the exceptionality of a particular event can be represented, running the risk, however, at a certain point, of transforming the city into a scenography of itself.