Villa San Giovanni (RC): from the Big One and the reconstruction. A City Museum between project and preservation of the memory

Abstract It’s been more than an hundred of years since the Big One that destroyed the city and the towns on the Messina’s Strict. One of the minor destroyed center was Villa San Giovanni, a small town with an important past, that thanks to a municipal archive recently rebuild, it give us the richness of a really atypical environment for these territories. Ante litteram industrial town, Villa San Giovanni at the end of the XIX century hosted many spinning mills for the production of the silk and the social state was very emancipated thanks to the work dignity of women, first entertainers for the making of silk. With the 1908’s earthquake, the destiny of the little town deeply changed. The projects of the reconstruction, stored in the municipal archive, show an important production of single-family houses, wanted by a middle class clients, educated and affluent, interested to the social, economical and urban recovery. Today, after an hundred of years from the reconstruction, we want to promote a museum place that will be able to gain the memory of the cultural Heritage of the Villa San Giovanni’s Reconstruction, designed after the earth-quake. Though the digitalizing of many projects, we drew many models that compose the digital 3D scene, useful to create a different reading for the cultural heritage, destroyed or strongly modified, hanged to the emotional and sensitive involvement.