BESIDES THE DESIGN: THE ANALYSIS AND DOCUMENTATION OF THE ANCIENT "VIA PRETORIA" IN POTENZA. THE MOST SIGNIFICANT TRANSFORMATIONS OF A ROMAN ROAD AXIS IN THE HISTORIC CITY.

The city of Potenza, in Basilicata, offers many points of reading of a complex urban fabric with an ancient history, and that, although it is an internal reality geographically and for centuries not many connected to the rest of the country, was the scene of important changes related to cultural ferment of the most wide-ranging. The design of the same becomes an opportunity for the understanding of these complex transformations, besides its documentation, leading to consider the city a small laboratory for the development of a methodology of investigation directed not to the large monumental urban areas, but to peripheral realities that, however, are particularly important in relation to specific historical and little investigated aspects. Particular attention was paid to the ancient "via Pretoria", made from the third century B.C., and object of a radical restructuring in the early nineteenth century when the city became the chief town. It is at this stage that are destroyed medieval buildings, built on previous ones of the Roman period, which are remembered from some blocks of bare. More substantial changes will be made in the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes of 1857 and 1980. The analysis of archival sources and field analysis allow to grasp the peculiarities of urban planning and architectural not always easy to read, given the complex urban stratification, in order to reconstruct an iconographic memory of the historic city. The architectures of value and all the minor architecture are investigated with a multidisciplinary approach, with the aim also to fill documentary gaps especially of the earliest phase of the city.