Between memory and Mediterranean paradigms: drawing and graphical analysis of eighteenth-century villas in the territory of Bagheria (Palermo)

This essay aims to propose a work on the villas of Plain of Hills in Palermo and Bagheria, "rereading" the famous book by Margherita De Simone "Palermo Villas, a historical profile and surveys" published in 1974, with the aim of representing – through digital design by comparing it with the traditional survey back then - the architectural phenomenon of the holiday residences in the eighteenth century in Palermo and its surroundings. These buildings had a very strong presence, characterizing its agricultural territory for more than one hundred years. A phenomenon, that of the villa in Plains of Hills and in Bagheria, which deeply studied in the book by Margherita De Simone, still holds a special interest. This is because often the renovations on these houses show the will to eradicate their nature by attributing them functions and destinations not strictly appropriate to the architectural "sense" that have characterized their "figure" for many years. The aim is to spread the dimensional, typological and morphological changes through the elaboration of "models" that can be explored and seen today as "updated" surveys of the cultural heritage and of the special phenomenon of the villa in the Sicilian eighteenth century, with particular reference to the territory of Bagheria.