Old City Hall

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #135

This is a neat, fairly modern-looking building in Cefalù, Sicily:

It’s the city hall, right across from the cathedral, in the main square of the old city. When we first strolled by it, I thought, wow, a new building in the middle of the old city!

But if you peek around the corner, on the side street, you see the modern styling is pretty much just a façade:

And then if you read the historical plaque out front, you find out it’s not a new building at all! Despite myriad alterations, the core structure dates back to the 1300s! It began life as a monastery, and more recently became city hall. In fact, the wording is unclear, and I can’t find much on the internet about this, so it might even predate the 1300s in some form.

If you look on Google Earth’s satellite view, you can see this isn’t exactly one building. Who knows how many it is? It’s half a small city block!

There are a lot of “Ship of Theseus” buildings in old cities like this. It’s hard to really say for sure when a building is from, in a lot of cases. Lots of buildings are based on the foundations of ruins, or contain bits of old buildings, or used materials from ruins.

Look at this, for example, in Catania, where “new” (i.e. less old) houses were built up against, and in some degree incorporated the ruins of an ancient Greek, and then Roman, theater.

In America, this is our version. Same structure. Second photo after partial demolition. Look at the windows on the left.

But as I always emphasize, I don’t think our version is less interesting, or even less historical. In a way, I think the American version is more interesting, because even in a landscape built for disposability, we inhabit, use, and reuse the bits and pieces of our surroundings in a manner as old as time.

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Related Reading:

Under The Street

The Dragon Inside

Didn’t Used To Be a Pizza Hut

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