4. Landscape and Historical City: Ecclesial Polarities in the Image of the City

The interpretation of landscape, in the figurative process, leads to the selection of particular places that condense the value of places, a storytelling of their identity. The legibility of the image, a structured identity of the space, is synthesized in a stratified image that tells the story and the history of the place. Also, if our own historical cities are not a matter of easy codifiability, here studies compete by representation to transcribe a selection of the values therein contained, through urban cataloguing, architectural survey, and drawings, useful to transcribe and abstract the relationship between parts. Reading the landscape, and in particular the image of the city, it allows us to understand how the simple vision becomes form, full of meaning. European cities have a common image and identity, conveyed by the square overlooked by the church, the space of political power and the place of social gathering. Perhaps, also from the outside, the churches with their steeples appear as the principal actors on the urban scene. Christianity, as shown in particular in the reality of the small town, represents the deep roots of European culture, the soul of the landscape. It possible to show how, in the relationship between architecture, image, and city form, the citizen finds here identitary places to care for, beautifying them with art, as in this study is described in the case study of the city of Perugia, a paradigm of the occidental urban space. Behind the historical walls, after a research process based on direct monitoring and the following cataloguing, the presence of 125 liturgical buildings emerges, among churches, convents, monasteries, oratories, conservatories, hospitals, mountains, and chapels, for a citizenship that counts, from the medieval epoch to modernity, about 19,000 people. But the real value of this heritage for landscape may be better testified by their confiscation in the half of the nineteen century for the consequential transformation of ecclesial polarities into space for new functions (shops, restaurants, storage areas, carpentries, gyms, etc.): in this way, the value of the relationship between man and his architecture appears more clearly, the dialogue on the language of signs that continues in his valence. The approach in the topic of representation is central to find the invisible relationship and the image roles that characterize the quality of the urban environment.