Piazza delle Pietre d’Italia

The project of the Memorial of the Great War “Casa della III Armata” of Fogliano Redipuglia begins with the reconfiguration of the external spaces at the foot of Colle Sant’Elia, overlooking the great Military Shrine.
In this regard, it was decided to divide the entire project into a first functional fragment, which has the object of creating a large area that measures the two-dimensional extension of a twenty-meter-square square foot.
The quadrangular structure is the definition and delimitation symbol, fence and code of a conceptual order, shape of earth, stop, isolated time, immanence. It combines the characters of the regular figure with perpendicularity and being the simplest modular structure, through its nine nodes it can fragment into similar figures with infinite progresses found in the numerous “tributes” that this figure has devoted to many artists of every era and place. The rug becomes therefore the natural geometric delivery of the Shrine and the visual hinge of the paths that convey all the main directions.
Its square shape returns formal dignity to a space with indefinite margins and poorly related to the context.
Within this square there are 8047 stones, one for each Italian municipality, assembled according to a geometric pattern of triangular decomposition of the square form, referring to the stone decoration made according to the ancient technique of the sectile opus, reworked in the early ‘900 From the Bauhaus school in pictorial and tessuto works, mainly in the work of Anni Albers.
The floor was mounted dry on a recessed support structure in the ground, a system consisting of a series of steel supports suitably dimensioned to support the project loads, topped by a metal grille on which the individual stones are fixed by anchoring chemical. Each stone is separated from the other so as to allow the underlying lighting system to filter the light between the stone joints.
At night the stone carpet becomes a brazier, a lamp that continues to illuminate the Shrine toward the House of the Third Army, offering to the visitor a space marked by the gentle passage of the light footprints on the natural surface of the stone.
The inauguration of the carpet, which took place on a solemn ceremony on November 9, 2015, is the first testimony to a series of works focusing on the restoration of the Redipuglia Military Shrine and the redefinition of the role of the “House of the Third Army” within the Remembrance Park. [LINK]