Piazza della Rinascita

Some squares host ceremonies; this one hosts a city's daily life. Pescara's Piazza della Rinascita rose from the rubble of 1943 on Luigi Piccinato's drawing board and became so central to local socialising that residents gave it a household name: Piazza Salotto.

Why it matters

No other space sums up Pescara's twentieth century so neatly. The 1943 bombardments gutted the heart of the city, and the reconstruction chose to leave a void where blocks had stood, so that the new Pescara would have a proper meeting place as life shifted towards the coast and the 1863 railway station. The square was baptised Rinascita — rebirth — for the material, social and economic resurrection it was meant to embody. Since then the square has hosted political rallies, concerts and carnival celebrations.

What to notice

The square was repaved in 2006 with a mix of lava and white stone, and the old roadway of corso Umberto I that once cut it in two disappeared into the new surface. Around the square, the rebuilt Palazzo dei Portici stands on the corner with via Regina Elena in modern rationalist style, with Palazzo Arlecchino nearby; on the south side, Palazzo Testa hides courtyard sculptures by the artist Vicentino Michetti, whose ironical Elefantino of the 1970s poked fun at the concrete monuments then going up all over town. Two survivors of the old corso remain close by: Villa Urania at the entrance of viale Regina Margherita and the neo-Renaissance Palazzo Muzii, designed by Vincenzo Pilotti with Attilio Giammaria.

Context and history

The site belonged to corso Umberto I, the nineteenth-century spine that ran from the station area to the sea through three squares — today's Piazza Repubblica, Piazza Sacro Cuore and Piazza I Maggio. In the early 1900s the corso filled with cafes and literary circles, and public gatherings centred on nearby Piazza Sacro Cuore. After the war, the municipality handed the new square to Luigi Piccinato, whose project took shape between 1947 and 1950. Local journalists began calling it Piazza Salotto in the 1970s, a label the whole city adopted. For half a century the layout stayed untouched, until the 2006 repaving unified the space by erasing the traffic lane of the corso.