From ruin to hinge of urban renewal: the restoration of the church of St. Demetrius in Ceglie Messapica (BR)

The case of the Church of St. Demetrius in Ceglie Messapca is a typical example of how the recovery of a worship’s building, decommissioned and transformed into a ruin, may be central in the policy for the promotion of a historical center. In a moment of global crisis where the architectural heritage suffers the lack of economic resources for the recovery, protection and enhancement, restoration applied on the church of St. Demetrius wants to be a model of intervention considering that was made possible with a budget extremely limited. Beyond the technical and technological solutions adopted, the restoration project, which not aims to return the monument to the cult but proposes a new use, bases its foundations on an accurate phase of knowledge of the object, from the relief to the historical and archival research, from the analysis of diseases and disruptions to the understanding of the role of the building for the community. And it is necessary, in fact, establish a strong feeling between "knowledge" and "project", putting to any projectual proposal a comprehensive study of the structure, that is the knowledge of matter, physical and pathological, the identification of the layers of time that have made unique the monument. Advanced techniques of representation have enabled the "participation" in the project even to the nonexperts and then to the ordinary citizen. The success of the proposed intervention was born, so, even before the beginning of the works