La Roccia apartment | MDSAR Martino Di Silvestro

The apartment in the newly built property is located in a position between the sea and the Latomie dei Cappuccini.

After years of legal disputes, a construction company obtained permission to build in this place still suspended in time: a hereditary place of historical landscape information which, between the cliff, thelatomies and the land of the demolished Art Nouveau villa, was still able to transmit. The urban parcel includes a small Latomia, one of the first, quarried around 2500 years ago, which the competent public services tried to protect by tracing it on the city master plan.

Further on, to the west, about one hundred metres, is the large stone depression of the Capuchin Latomie which has so inspired etchers, painters and grand-tour travellers.

The Syracusan Latomie were identified in the archaeological topographical plan of Syracuse drawn up by the engineer Francesco Saverio Cavallari between 1880 and 1881. The excavations of the Latomie, carried out by the Greek colonists, were inscribed in the main cliff of the territory, in the Syracuse ridge, at the search for the best building stone.

The apartment of approximately one hundred and forty square meters is located on the top floor, close to the small Latomia dei Cappuccini and overlooks a portion of the sea.

The designer, having overcome the ethical problems of the real estate operation, found enthusiastic interlocutors in the owners of the apartment who, together with the architect, ventured into the development of the project inspired by the genius loci, making targeted modifications to the project.

The idea of rebuilding a cavea, a latomia inside the housing envelope came forward very soon, supported by shared references to memories of the place and by the glare of the light on the stone as well as by the memory of a swinging palm tree at the beginning of the nearby Avenue Tunisi.

In the project, therefore, we soon find the Latomia which has become a wardrobe-bookcase and at the same time a rock outcrop which modulates the spaces of the apartment and acts as a distribution of the rooms. The handcrafted rock furniture, made up of 19 metal modules, is dyed the honey colour of the local stone.

Some surfaces in the heart of the house are covered entirely in local stone, others in white like quarry talc. The kitchen furniture, the same colour as the metal furniture, is designed as an integration to this context of volumes and stone references.

The Latomie of Syracuse are rich in vegetation and centuries-old trees. A giant magnolia is located close to the building and invades the view from the large windows of the apartment subject to the intervention. The project features wooden furnishing elements that are also found on the back of the "rock" furniture; organic element which, together with the greenery, is part of the colour pattern of the project, recalling the thick vegetation of the Latomie and its exotic plants which also feed on memory.