Many years ago, an Italian soldier stationed on the Greek island of Leros wrote in a letter to his sweetheart back home that he was on L'Eros (love). Reality or fiction, this story characterises the feeling that the visitor risks experiencing while on this piece of Dodecanese land: you either ignore it or fall in love with it. For an Italian, the second hypothesis is easier. Not due to misunderstood nationalism - the most important Italian navy base in the Mediterranean during World War II was located on Leros - but because on this 54sq km piece of rock with a population of some 8,000 people in the winter, dedicated to the goddess of hunting Artemis (the Roman goddess Diana), there are traces of an Italian culture that only now are being rediscovered. There are many natural beauties, beaches and attractions on the island, which was described by Homer in the Iliad and is still genuine Greek and relatively unknown for international tourism. The landscape of Leros features sweet hills dotted by small wheat farms and wide and spectacular bays looking more like big lakes than like the open sea. However the true jewel is Lakki. Those who arrive there on board a sailing boat pushed by the meltem (the strong wind that blows from the Aegean Sea in the summer) will have the feeling of arriving on an abandoned set of a Fellini film: 'Amarcord' to be precise. Dusty, demode, rather tormenting. The story of this place starts when on Sunday, May 13, 1912 three Italian battle ships anchored at Leros after Italy had 'temporarily' lost to Turkey the control over the Dodecanese Islands. Control that became definitive with the Treaty of Lausanne of July 24 1923. The destiny of this 'property' - rather than 'colony' - changed just like landscapes surrounding this splendid bay changed: the hills were excavated and became galleries and bunkers for anti-aircraft artillery. The name Portolago was chosen by the Italians due to the geographic conformation: only 400-metres-wide entrance from the sea in the middle of two high rocky coasts and inside, a true lake where the first overseas base of the Italian Navy hydroplanes was created. An entire city was build at the biggest natural port not only in Greece but in the entire eastern Mediterranean. Portolago is a rare example of urban structure made according to the rules of the Modern Movement both as general plan and as architecture of the single buildings to the extent of being identified by various experts as "an exceptional case" of architecture of the forgotten International Style. For many years Portolago remained in oblivion probably because its structures were identified, too superficially, as "architecture of the regime", and therefore not worthy of notice. But in contrast with the colossal buildings of the doubtful taste of the fascist regime, the architects of the Italian Rationalism developed in Portolago a modern urban plan including public and commercial buildings, facilities, houses, parks and tree-lined streets far from the celebration of the imperial dreams and the control of the regime. The Portolago designers - Armando Bernabiti and Rodolfo Petracco - remain linked to an essential rationalist language in which some find the signs of Art Deco while others define it 'metaphysic' due to the urban and architecture design that perfectly refers back to the great pictorial season of Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carra, Alberto Savinio, typical for this period. The plan of the city - which resembles a butterfly with its wings spread - is divided into two squares; the streets are wide with long lines of eucalypts; the central market - formed as a circle with watchtower - is considered one of the most important buildings created in the first period of the Modern Movement. The tower is an example of rationalism. It is a perfect parallelepiped broken by the asymmetry of the watch's position and by an overhanging terrace which breaks the edge of the construction. Too bad that Bernabiti and Petracco are almost unknown in Italy. The architecture historiography only recently started recreating their activities. (ANSAmed).
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου