“With regards to the Hamon towers (…), their presence characterizes the sky-line of the city seen from the station towards the sea and towards the industrial expansion areas of the 1950s and overall the same artefacts define an idea of landscape. The towers also have plastic and sculptural value which would be well suited to hosting art exhibitions, even in their evocative interior lit from above, thus characterizing the same plan provisions for the location on the right banks of the “Parco delle Arti”. Thus, in June 2013, the Superintendence of Ravenna wrote to the Municipality of Ravenna within the POC Darsena through the official Valeria Bucchignani and the Superintendent Antonella Ranaldi.
Anyone who has seen them inside knows that we are talking about unimaginable and breathtaking spaces, of a beauty that leaves one astonished by the imposing majesty and perfection of the hyperboloid shape, defined by a surface of reinforced blocks only 30 cm thick which it rises to a height of 55 metres. Some say they entered with musical instruments, and played with extraordinary results. Others took unforgettable images. And in fact the acoustics are amazing. An eye open towards the sky which makes them similar to a contemporary Pantheon, or to the vision of the afterlife in the “Ascension to the Empyrean”, a work from the early sixteenth century attributed to Hieronymous Bosch. They were used to cool, through natural draft, enormous quantities of high-temperature water coming from the plants: nothing polluting, therefore, unlike the poisons that circulated in the completely demolished refinery. For years citizens and scholars have mobilized to ask for its protection and recovery. We remember the passionate words of Cristina Mazzavillani Muti. Now, administrators from other places like the barbarians of antiquity, without any plausible plan to justify this wickedness, propose demolition. The Ravenna Port System Authority purchased the former SAROM land from ENI with public funds for 7,808,000 euros, and at the same time ENI would have communicated the start of demolition works. ENI, with profits of several billion that it continues to take from Ravenna, and main sponsor of the Ravenna Festival.
This is all unacceptable. How unacceptable it is that the mayor, to liquidate the matter, alludes ad memoriam to the images of Antonioni’s film Deserto Rosso, which instead portray a tower already demolished in the former ANIC, and not those of SAROM. One of the most insensitive and unscrupulous mayors towards the territory to be administered that our city has ever hosted. Elsewhere, structures of this kind have been recovered, as in Marghera for the former Vetrocoke, now the Venice Heritage Tower, a place for cultural events and shows, or the Pirelli headquarters at Bicocca in Milan, where a tower has been maintained by creating offices around it , meeting rooms connected by aerial walkways, 350-seat auditorium and a heliport.
“The magnamagna of the fake green”, as someone commented? What disturbs the coexistence of a banal however extensive photovoltaic system with the towers? What does Mrs Muti say now? And all the hectares of forest that have formed around the towers in these years of abandonment? But in Ravenna the bulldozers are always very welcome when it comes to removing collective cultural heritage, as is happening for example with historic bathing huts, perhaps certain that poorly informed citizens will quickly forget and look the other way. But there could be more: the towers, from what appears, were built in 1950, therefore, being more than 70 years old, they could already become a historical-cultural asset. Furthermore, being, as it seems, already belonging to the AdSP, the constraint would exist automatically, unless the Superintendence decides otherwise. As with the shed issue. Why all the rush?
Italia Nostra sends an urgent request to the Superintendence of Ravenna to express an opinion on this wicked demolition project which deals a new very serious blow to a redevelopment of the former industrial port of European scope and worthy of a city, and requests verification both on the possibility of declaration of the cultural interest and the existence of the bond by law. The request was also sent to the Ravenna Prosecutor’s Office for information. It also sends a request to the Municipality of Ravenna regarding the alleged critical conditions of the artefacts. If the reports are similar to those that allowed the destruction of the last dock transhipment device at the current “Darsenale” on a weekend in July 2015, there is little to be sure about. From what was known, at least the westernmost tower was still in good condition. No more erasing culture and memory in Ravenna, no more bulldozers and TNT, at least one Hamon tower will be saved!
Italy Our Ravenna section
the featured photo is by Alessandro Garavini
