Wounded places: from devastation to warning

Throughout history many villages and cities have been abandoned following natural disasters (floods, landslides, earthquakes), war events (bombings) or due to changed economic, political, social situations. If in many cases they have been left to a progressive degradation due to neglect or disinterest, elsewhere the desire to crystallize the conditions, although precarious, of a certain historical moment, comes from very specific choices: from the small center of Conza della Campania in Irpinia, to the cities of Beichuan in China and Pripjat in Ukraine; from the French villages of Douaumont and Oradoursur- Glane, to the Spanish Belchite; from the Japanese island of Hashima to the Chilean mining towns of the Atacama desert. The paper focuses on the analysis of some sites wounded by natural disasters or events, not reconstructed, but deliberately left to their state of ruin: places of memory, collective identity, warning and reflection which, paradoxically, thanks to their dilapidated state, have recovered, if not created for the first time, a high level of attractiveness.