Resumen de Le fonti archivistiche per la storia di un bastione e delle sue molteplicivicende (secc. XVI-XX)
The fortified bastion known as ‘del Salice’ is what is still preserved of the sixteenth-century walls that used to surround the urban nucleus of Fossano, in southern Piedmont. Designed by Gianmaria Olgiati after the first half of the sixteenth century, construction works began under the French occupation in 1536 and the structure was perfected during the period of Spanish domination. The events connected with its construction emerge from the archival documentation. Thanks to new historical sources, the latter has been updated on the many vicissitudes and the heterogeneity of uses to which the fortified structure has been adapting over the centuries. The stratification of solutions determined by the peculiar needs of different eras shows, according to the verification of sources, the experience of the bastion and its ability to adapt to unexpected solutions. And finally, it returns to present its first-born nature, although alienated from the original defensive purposes, after a careful restoration and its philological recovery. This is a characteristic example of how a community has adapted, over the centuries, an essential and significant presence of the town to the needs gradually required by the military, political and cultural transformations. It has been a place of aulic representation of the city in the eighteenth century, with the construction of a solemn staircase, it became a venue of social entertainment afterwards, an air-raid shelter in the war period, without in the meantime discarding the hypothesis of demolition: with the referendum involvement of the citizens to verify its feasibility. It eventually turned into the memorial site of the fallen soldiers, with the monument constructed by the architect Carlo Mollino. The examination of the archival production on the fortification is proposed as an added and parallel contribution to the architectural reading of the formal element, not to be intended as a replacement of the design interpretation and understanding of its plastic component, but to strengthen its presence, nowadays silent and stately, with the history that has been accompanying it for five centuries.
