But the city doesn’t tell its past, it contains it, like the lines in the palms of our hands, registered in street corners, in the grids of the windows, the stair railings, in the antennas on roofs, each fragment in turn crossed by scratches, jagged cuts, grazes, gun shots tells its past… says Italo Calvino in his book, the Invisible Cities
Every where we go, everything we see is made out of patterns of history, each object has hundredths of stories to tell only if we knew how to read them. Doing some research for my thesis, I found this incredible place called Ospedale del Mare, in Lido di Venezia. A complex organism rich with patterns of history and stories of which many have been lost. To us today it only represents a sprawling, neglected and atmospherically crumbling old hospital complex with high potential for incredible photography and thus we fail to see or feel what it really is and represents. Alive in the 1930, as a prosperous complex of health, hygiene and freshness, it is as dead and as forgotten today as the diseases it so much promised to cure and most probably even did. Famous for it’s location and quality of space and air, being situated on the sea side, it offered numerous therapy methods, symbol of well-being and sanitation. But nothing lasts for ever and people like seasons, change and forget and move on, towards better, brighter futures. Buildings we leave behind remind us that something has happened, someone has been there and patterns of spaces, events and activities survive in melancholy to inform future generations of what we were, what we did and we used to be. Architecture stands as a witness that we existed in a past forgotten to us. We may have moved on but traces of what used to be, remain carved deep in our collective memory, our history is and for ever will be a part of us even if we have forgotten it or not.
The creator gives life, the preserver sustains it and when time comes the destroyer takes it back, only so that the creator can give it back in other circumstances, in another form, in another lifetime…
Photographer Luca D’Agostino captured some of the stories told by the hospital and here are only a few of the pictures.
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