Ginex_2018_Clean_Città_editor.pdf.

Before the sands cities. Nefta and the mountain oasis of Chott el Djerid, Tamerza, Mides and Chebika. Procedures and methodologies for knowledge and reading pre-Sahara urban morphologies Introduction The Mediterranean zone often calls up the faraway images, where ground, water and light are very important elements. These images aren’t usually real elements, but the abstract ideas, where the archetypal notion plays a decisive role. So, it will be very difficult to explain the architectural system which defines the Mediterranean zone, but every research can consider as an inside part of a general context. The Mediterranean architecture forms as an elaborate stratification where its mean represents the analytical researches which classify its own elements. It is only the nature of the place, its microcosmic idea of a general event, which it gives uniqueness to the Mediterranean elements that put on the safeguard power of the urban and morphology growth of the whole area, and above all, of the Islamic zone. I have been looking to represent through the study of some sample towns of the Mediterranean background, reported to the Tunisian area of the Maghreb, the logical processes which characterized the urban settlements of the North-African area in order to define a vocabulary of Mediterranean elements and forms to catch and showing the only aspects which characterize the whole geographical background. Therefore, this work is a tessera of a hypothetical mosaic of research which look for composing a “map” of “invariant” forms as summation by parts; and at the same time, this union between form and architecture represents a reference archetype which gives to the Mediterranean town and its “eternity and stability” a cultural recognition of the Mediterranean model.