Contemporary cities and the presence of the church

Abstract

This intervention aims to investigate, through the analysis of a concrete case, the relationship between the thermal city and the ecclesial building during the last century. It describes, then, a vision of Italian architecture in a particular historical and cultural context, positioning itself within broader themes: the sacred architecture of the 20th century and the architecture of the thermal cities. Thermal cities that, with certainty, are always different, capturing and transmitting new and refined architectural expressions; In this sense, the diffusion of the Liberty style in these contexts is paradigmatic.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been a particular boost in the tourist development of spa cities. The profound transformation of nineteenth-century society, along with the passage of an aristocratic clientele to a bourgeois clientele, characterizes the transformation of functional models and representativeness in the thermal baths. In particular, since the second decade of the century, an attempt has been made to respond to the dual elitist and community vocation: this will inevitably influence the urban development of the city already characterized by a peculiar physiognomy. In Italy, in the cases that we are going to examine, the urban readjustment derived from the development of thermal tourism, involved enormous works of demolition of valuable buildings, among which also preexisting churches; demolitions that were necessary to make room for the new architecture, also cultural, more appropriate to the demands of the time and representative of the peculiarity of these places.
In this context, the identity of the new ecclesiastical building assumed values, either from the religious point of view or as a sign of civil society that was also, on the other hand, an economically participant in construction. The importance and complexity of the subject induced the community, in some cases to call specific competitions in which many architects and engineers were involved, offering, precisely, a valuable perspective of the architectural culture of the time on the theme of the sacred building .