Avvicinarsi ai castelli/Approaching the castles

The search for signs from the past and the desire to preserve them over time is a psychological necessity that manifests itself even more intensely when, unfortunately one experiences the lack of a vision underpinned by history; something that occurs with increasing frequency in our modern world. As many environmental, psychological, and neuroscientific studies prove, such a state could have significant consequences for the human condition regarding psychic and physical well-being. One way of dealing with this, albeit unknowingly, is to resort to the collective subconscious, meaning the psychic totality with which one can reconnect in various ways, including by delving into – or approaching – urban contexts or architectural artefacts from the past. The castle, with its imagery, power and symbolic connotations, reveals a deep and vigorous archetypal essence, with its continuity and persistence over the centuries and its ability to reverse its sense of importance without leading to a loss of evocative power. The castle is the guardian of the memory and spirit of a place where a community developed and grew over time. As such, it is also the repository of a cultural, urban and landscape identity. Entering a castle, therefore, might mean an experience that can evoke archetypes through which people can reunite with their subconscious and reclaim their collective identity. Today, renewing the accessibility of historical buildings generally starts with considering the requirements of preservation and inclusion through an organic process of protection and development that can sometimes attribute new functional meanings. In such cases, design becomes particularly complex in terms of the necessity to respect the past – and its typological, spatial, formal and testimonial characteristics – while adopting contemporary uses open to all, following principles of equality, independence and autonomy, in the pursuit of that “right to beauty” enshrined in the Faro Convention. As a result, in assessing Sardinia’s fortified landscape, the inaccessibility of each site was identified in physical, sensory and cognitive terms, which, while generally present, differ in intensity, depending on the specific characteristics of the cases in question. Based on this analysis, the illustration of exemplary local, national, and international design experiences supported the physical and virtual solutions proposed.