The moments of crisis teach us to cultivate what is essential, a feeling that we often forget. And the ruins earn our attention, because they make us feel the time, they are the mirror of our existential condition, generous promises that turn our attention in emotion. It is not just to preserve the past, we must be able to feel their breath. To design the existing we have to think in a mnemonic way, the emotional artifice that helps to transform the traces in memory of the actual experience. This study is focused on the role of the contemporary project as narrative and mnemonic device in the archaeological invisible landscapes. Times. These are timeless places for excellence, fragile contexts where the contemporary project is called to verify the creative, emotional and relational possibilities of new architectural figures, timid but necessary to ensure the permanence. Traces. The issue of the conservation of partial and marginal ruins refers to the sensitive insertion of the new with the ancient, as a tool to re-activate a memory of residual facts and spaces. To protect the excavations, the weak archaeological traces, or to reconstruct the invisible signs, means generating reciprocal relationships between the parts, to put the places in safety and give them new identities, to work on stratification by defining analogical relationships useful to express the presence to the contemporary. Networks. In the background, there is a need to think about the archaeological plan as an imprint of the city’s past and as a strategic design of/in the city of the future. Relational practices are related to the materiality and physicality of archaeological landscapes where the project can generate networks that increase the permanence of the relationships between users and spaces, people and places. Spaces. The topic will be expressed through the analysis of best practices and the applied experimental design for the case study of Aquileia.
