Storage, Management and Exploitation. Re-discovery Prison Heritage throught an Informative System

The recognition of the documentary collections relating to the abandoned historical prisons, which have only recently been made available for consultation, has provided considerable stimulus, revealing useful information not only for reconstructing the history of prison architecture in terms of design choices, techniques and materials, but also bringing to light environmental contexts significantly different from those of today. The paper illustrates the results of the research carried out on two case studies: the San Sebastiano prison in Sassari and the New Penitentiary, never built, designed for the city of Cagliari. They proved to be of considerable interest in terms of highlighting the close links between materials and techniques, between design and site, and between landscape, site and architecture. The relationships identified were reassembled at the local level and integrated into the political and legislative framework of the emerging Kingdom of Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century. They describe territorial areas where the process of urbanization, driven in the public sector by the need for modernization and in the private sector by pressing speculative interests, directed important transformations of the landscape.