L'Aquila 1703: Lost, Demolished, Rebuilt

The city of L'Aquila has been shaped by multiple erasures and reconstructions in response to devastating seismic events. Founded in the thirteenth century as a consortium of communities from the contado, each castello (community) owned and managed a portion of the urban fabric, known as a locale, which included a piazza and a replicated suburban church. The 1703 earthquake marked a turning point, disrupting the city's symbolic topography and leading to a profound urban transformation, characterised by the abandonment, reconstruction, and transfer of artworks and cults.

Research into the architectural and devotional implications of this transformation would benefit from examining the urban scale and exploring the complex relationships between the city's physical outlook and spatialised heterogeneous data. However, the loss of many buildings and artworks poses significant challenges to this research.

The seminar will be an opportunity to present the work in progress behind the platform 'L'Aquila 1703: Lost, Demolished, Rebuilt', a collaboration between Chiara Capulli and the DH Lab, devised within the ‘Art Histories / Catastrophes / (Heritage) / Ecologies [AC(H)E]’ project led by Gerhard Wolf at the KHI. The digital resource brings together data from a diverse range of sources, including secondary literature, church and notarial records, and the valuable visual reference of the 1753 Vandi plan of L'Aquila. The aim is to analyse such materials in a non-linear, spatial fashion, to gain a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics that shaped the city's urban landscape and better assess the role of catastrophic events in it.