Patrimoni Architettonici Mediterranei. Un caso limite: la città-oasi di Ghadames (Libia)

In a broad view of the Mediterranean world, the oasis-city of Ghadames in the pre-Saharan Libyan Fezzan, is not an exception compared to the conventional idea of Mediterranean architecture but rather the expression of an architectural heritage in which the characters that define the urban fabrics and settlement forms of Mediterranean cities come to their highest and concentrated expression. Among these characters, we wish to point to the compactness and continuity of the residential system, which integrates inhabited spaces together with public paths in a single whole. Open spaces are reduced to a minimum not just for climate reasons, sometimes extreme, but also and above all to limit as much as possible the built areas in the environmental system of the oasis, whose overall size is dictated by the availability of water. A greater occupation of land for housing would reduce the space available for agriculture and the production of food for the settled population.Another element that Ghadames shares with many of the Mediterranean urban centers is the appropriation of the archaeological heritage, where this is present, in the form of recovery and reuse of existing manufactured materials as spolia. The original and creative use of spolia in the construction of buildings and living spaces reveals an unusual attention to the quality of public and private environments.