Tuesday 18 June 2024 – 8.00pm
Knights’ Square collects among its buildings a very long history of events given that, from the incarceration of Count Ugolino della Gherardescain the Muda Tower in 1288 to the various ceremonies carried out there i Knights of the Order of Saint Stephen More than 800 years elapsed between the 16th and 19th centuries, from the fascist rallies of the twenty years to the student demonstrations in the 1970s.
Such a long and complex history of events that occurred in this place, so central to the life of Pisa, has led to the Superior Normal Schoolwhich with the Caravan Palaceoverlooks the square, in collaboration with the
Pisa Foundation to put into practice an ambitious project that will allow open its buildings to public visits: in addition, in fact, to Palazzo della Carovana, also the Church of Santo Stefano dei CavalieriThe Rectory PalaceThe Palace of the TwelveThe Clock Palace and the Church of San Rocco.
The project began in 2022 and will continue until 2025 and includes numerous restoration interventions, all under the scientific responsibility of the professor Lucia Simionatowho coordinated various teachers of the Scuola Normale but also important international scholars.
“The Normale has linked its history to Piazza dei Cavalieri since 1846, when it was moved to the Palazzo della Carovana – said the professor Luigi Ambrosio,
director of the School – since that year, other buildings in this beautiful urban area have come into use by the Normale, which has taken every care to enhance them. An example of this is the Palazzo dell’Orologio, where between the end of the Seventies and the early Eighties the infamous Tower of Fame of Dante’s memory was brought back into view. Among these actions is the important initiative that we are presenting today: a complex project, not only of research, but also of scientific dissemination“.
The project allows you to enter the architectures created by Vasariwhich this year marks the 450th anniversary of his death, in the midst of the Renaissance, accompanied by researchers, students and doctoral students of the Normale through routes that lead to visits to individual buildings but also to follow a thematic route.
“Telling a story about a square is not easy – said Professor Simionato – as a living organism continues to change both in the history of its buildings and in the events it hosts and which make up its history. In the project the dual objective was understand this complexity and communicate it in an accessible way. We therefore did not limit ourselves to investigating Piazza dei Cavalieri only for its extraordinary architectural and artistic riches, but we also tried to enhance the experiential aspectstudying how life took place within it over the centuries and who were the protagonists who animated it”.
Alongside the access routes, the project made possible the creation of piazzadeicavalieri.sns.it, a site ad hoc which collects all the files relating to the history of the places and the characters who lived there. Dante, Vasari, Cosimo de’ Medici, insights into buildings and monuments, from the Palazzo dell’Orologio to that of the Twelve, the Church of San Rocco or the Monument of Ulisse Dini, all rigorously reread and updated.
