The success of the ecclesiastical institutions at the origin of urban transformations. Sant’Angelo in Borgo
in Monopoli: evolution, vulnerability, abandonment; the start of an architectural restoration site for an
urban restoration project
The sixteenth-century San Michele Arcangelo, the eighteenth-century Sant’Angelo in Borgo church,
documents the social and building development of the neighborhood through its transformations.
From the reading and understanding of the building, on the occasion of a punctual safety intervention
of the elevation structures carried out in 2015, we begin to study the evolutionary process of the
monument, starting from the construction, the transformations, the damage suffered by the bombings of
the Second War, the neglect, the improper interventions of the seventies of the twentieth century on the
deformed structures, the reactivation of never resolved problems of its stratification process, the complete
abandonment with the closure to worship.
The “direct intervention” becomes a fundamental moment for the understanding of the building and its
vulnerability but welcomes a wider interest of the ‘contemporary’ value of a larger piece of the historic city.