I Paesaggi termali. Luoghi pubblici e identità collettive

The theme of the thermal baths is rather complex as well as broad, involves a wide range of architectural, typological, technical and social aspects, and often gives rise to ‘moments’ of confusion also in the definition of the object of study itself: public baths, health establishments, spas. Likewise, living a thermal experience means many things together, lived in places even diametrically different: a stay in a large complex with spas and other innumerable functions inside, a park in a natural setting with sources, pools and swimming pools, a small establishment in a secluded place, frequenting baths for free and without special services. The research outlines the characteristics of all these places, reconstructs the common features and highlights differences and contradictions. However, we do not want to focus on a functionalistic discourse but on the significance that space and thermal experience have always had as a public and private moment, intimate and collective, meditative and convivial, physical and spiritual. To succeed in this purpose, the research makes use of the ‘landscape method’ which, with the great complexity and variety of meaning that is proper to it, is considered suitable to investigate and include the whole subject in its entirety. The thermal landscape is not simply a place where thermal water is present, it is an entity made up of natural and cultural elements, historical and geographical, functional and visual, both material and immaterial. On the one hand, water draws and conforms the territory and on the other, it suffers the action of the community that the territory inhabits it. From a utilitarian and practical point of view, man realizes a whole series of ‘objects’, architectures and artefacts, which are used to exploit water. From a social and cultural point of view, it attributes them curative values and symbolic and metaphorical meanings. Precisely because of its constant dual nature, material and immaterial and for the fact of being a dynamic system, the thermal landscape to be understood has been studied and investigated both through an objective path, which has analysed the various natural, territorial and spatial systems, both through a subjective path, which has considered the perceptual process, the psychological attachment, the attribution of symbolic values and historical memory that the population experiences towards the landscape itself. Thermal landscapes offer an organic reading able to illustrate artefacts, traces and anthropic interventions that integrate with the natural environment and underline the link that the communities establish with the places. In particular the instrument of the landscape project based on dialogue with the context, with the history, with the local communities it is fundamental in protecting and in giving birth to thermal cultures capable of enhancing the territories in which the waters flow, from the physical and cultural point of view but also of the tourism, economy and social life of the communities.