Piazza Marconi is re-born. After years of waiting, the decisive intervention of the Fondazione Arvedi has allowed this splendid part of the historical centre to be enjoyed by the townspeople. The Square confronts an archaeological legacy and is necessarily a reference and foretaste of it.
The configuration of the surface, aimed at being enjoyed by pedestrians, brings together many symbols, prefigures and conforms a direction for approaching Palazzo dell’Arte and incorporates the access to the underground car park in an artistic dimension which transforms the ventilation grills into craters and convex forms distinguished by different materials and from which a ring of soft night light spreads; a broad path paved in light-coloured stone, accompanied longitudinally by “threads” of matter (steel and other metals which also change into linear benches)and crossed by lines paved in white stone, indirectly leads to the entrance of Palazzo dell’Arte, highlighting the unitary coherence of Piazza Marconi and Palazzo dell’Arte.
A place of urban transformation, the Square is meant to be a symbol, anticipating a path connecting the identity of Roman classicism, as revealed by the archaeological excavations, and at the same time anticipating the violinmaking and musical identity to be found in Palazzo dell’Arte. A group of maple trees symbolizes the wood of the instruments, while the names of the great masters of Cremonese violinmaking and music, which once would have been carved into the walls of the buildings, ideally may now clearly appear on the surface of the square, or constitute the nucleus of an artistic intervention limiting the prospective itinerary in stone. Transform and accumulate: an aesthetic urban meaning is added to the technical objects, partially covering and shading the car park’s entrance and exit ramp, transforming, as has been said, the ventilation grills into architectonic elements, increasing the number of meanings that the paths can reveal, enlivening those narrow strips of matter (metals, stone) towards urban continuity, towards the other elements that emerge in the historical centre, in a continuous osmosis.
