BARI – Today’s Bari. And tomorrow’s. Between impressions, origins and desires. The Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno promotes a discussion on the main current issues that concern the Apulian capital in an overview that can become a vision of the near future.
It is not easy after the months of the “Bari case” and during the electoral campaign. But if not now, when? The healthy forces of the city must seize the moment to express their projects, their needs, their dreams. For many centuries Bari was that part of the city which today, in the representation of its citizens, is Bari Vecchia and which until 25 years was an impregnable fort for the high criminal density. In the widespread representation of the people of Bari, old Bari was born in the nineteenth century, and more precisely in 1813 when Gioacchino Murat built the Murattiano village, which defines the original nucleus of the new, mercantile and Levantine Bari, which immediately distances itself from the historic center and its history, creating, by difference, the image of the old city as it will be represented in the urban imagination from that moment on. The new Bari joins the old one while always maintaining a rigid extraneousness. If, as the architect Aldo Rossi observed, cities remember through their buildings, it is in the same way that they can choose to forget: Bari severs its link with its past history by dividing the new village from the old one and making two cities that they juxtapose without ever integrating osmotically. The connection of the people of Bari with the “historic centre” – therefore Bari Vecchia – which must be kept distinct from the “centre” of Bari which in the widespread representation is the nineteenth-century Murattiano village, which with its shopping streets and institutional buildings has thus immediately an alternating, problematic and even contradictory trend. Only in recent years have the two Baris learned to coexist in the same urban space, abandoning the past polite indifference, so much so that, indeed, now Bari Vecchia is increasingly cited with pride for the work of reconquest and social regeneration accomplished.
The Gazzetta’s initiative will unfold through various moments of reflection and discussion, having as its lead “It’s Bari”.
This afternoon, at 5.30 pm, in the central hall of the Bari Chamber of Commerce, the photographic exhibition will be inaugurated, curated by Carmela Lovero, set up with the images of seven authors from Bari who will tell their vision of the city with their gazes. Some front pages of our newspaper will remember some events. The digital and fluid gaze of Instagramers will then rest on four external walls.
The gaze of Instagramers in the images of Bari will kick off a photo competition that will last for the entire month of June. The images participating in the competition will be evaluated by a commission that will choose the first 10 photographs to which prizes will be awarded. The images will be published in the Gazzetta.
We have the ambition, through the curated, elegant, high-impact exhibition, to reposition your historical daily life in its analogue dimension among the protagonists of the cultural scene of Southern Italy and in particular of the City of Bari.
The exhibition will be the backdrop to a container open to debate on the city among economic operators, business, commerce and service categories, with academics, sociologists, urban and landscape planners, artists, administrators, business managers, representatives of bodies and institutions.
Participating in the inauguration this afternoon will be Luciana Di Bisceglie, president of the Bari Chamber of Commerce, Marco Bascapè, Superintendent of the Bibliographical Archive of Puglia, and Carmela Lovero, curator of the photographic exhibition.
The talks will take place from 21st to 30th May and will have as their themes People, Culture, Sport, Tourism, Architecture and Development…
