PIAZZA A. MORO and
VIA DELLA REPUBBLICA

Bitonto, Bari (IT)
Executive Project

In the heart of Bitonto, the transformation of Piazza Aldo Moro and Via della Repubblica unfolds as a poetic rewriting of the urban fabric. More than a redevelopment, it is a gesture that restores identity to the city center, drawing inspiration from the lame – the ancient furrows that carve the Apulian landscape and preserve its collective memory.

The square is no longer an island surrounded by traffic, but a vast mineral carpet of local stone, continuous and seamless, erasing thresholds and unifying streets, sidewalks, and crossings. The ground opens as a civic stage, designed for encounter and pause, for flows and stillness, balancing mobility with permanence. Permeable surfaces narrate a more resilient city, one that learns to converse with water and natural rhythms.

Greenery becomes the new architecture of the space, expanded twenty-five times over its current extent. The historic holm oaks are not sacrificed but relocated, regaining dignity within a design that interweaves shadow and light, memory and future. Around them, Mediterranean shrubs and seasonal blossoms introduce color, fragrance, and biodiversity. The urban landscape turns into a diffuse garden, where nature is not ornament but structure

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Urban furnishings are inserted as fragments of a coherent language, never overpowering, always accompanying the gestures of collective life.
At the heart of the square, a vast urban void unfolds — a quiet, unencumbered surface that seems to wait, suspended, for life to inhabit it. This emptiness is intentional: a space stripped to its essence, returned to the city as a place of gathering and recognition. It becomes a mutable stage where civic celebrations, open-air concerts, religious processions, and local festivities can all take place in turn. Its strength lies in this openness, in the refusal of a single program, offering instead a generous and ever-changing ground for collective experience.

Via della Repubblica, once a channel of traffic, is transformed into a pedestrian boulevard. The continuity of stone invites walking and cycling, reshaping the city’s tempo. Speed retreats, space slows down, and daily experience becomes more intimate, more human.

This transformation is both physical and symbolic: Piazza Moro and Via della Repubblica emerge as an urban manifesto, a place where the city rediscovers itself through slowness, the shade of trees, and the dialogue between stone and nature. A contemporary landscape, born of memory yet oriented toward the future, with delicacy, measure, and ambition.

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