The Endless Road

La strada infinita

An ancient territorial axis along which a part of the city has been structured. By virtue of its rank, this road will continue to play an ordering role within the city, i.e. the role of a modern armour, becoming the testimony of large complexes and spaces that, since the mid-19th century, have articulated the expanding city and given shape to its new needs: a psychiatric hospital, a cemetery, factories, a shopping centre, an amusement park. These places reject the logic of urban homogeneity, imposing themselves as coherent, autonomous realities. Some authors call these (separate and differently regulated) places ‘heterotopies’. In these places, the spatial dissolution that characterizes contemporary cities is enormously amplified. Boundaries, which are in themselves uncertain, definitively fade, whereby any act of delimitation or attribution of relevance becomes utterly impossibl