La Pergola

In Santa Sofia, a town in the Romagna Apennines, architecture and landscape have always dialogued with the life of the community. Within this context, the La Pergola area served for decades as the town’s social fulcrum: an identity-shaping place that safeguarded collective memories and united different generations. Its closure and gradual abandonment marked its decline, but did not erase its symbolic value. Even today, despite its marginal condition, La Pergola is perceived as an integral part of the urban fabric—a place rich with potential to be returned to the community. From here the project begins, aiming to transform a shared legacy into a bridge toward the future, able to address the social, cultural, and environmental needs of the present.

The new La Pergola is conceived as an urban device and social infrastructure, designed to stitch fractures back together and restore continuity between nature and the built environment, between public and private. The pergola itself becomes the symbolic element and generator of the intervention: a recognizable sign that casts shade, welcomes, and connects—transforming into an open, inclusive space. Not just architecture, then, but an integrated civic system designed to host schools, sports and cultural spaces, meeting areas, and outdoor places conceived as extensions of everyday life.

The project is grounded in a sustainable, intergenerational approach matured through a participatory process that gathered the community’s desires, memories, and visions. The buildings converse with the surrounding landscape through courtyards, terraces, and accessible pathways that ensure continuity and inclusion. Green roofs become active surfaces, while façades—calibrated between transparency and opacity—promote daylight and visual comfort. Materials are natural and durable, in harmony with the site’s palette. Bioclimatic design—guided by solar simulations and shadow studies—has made it possible to optimize winter solar gain and summer ventilation, reducing consumption and increasing overall energy efficiency.

La Pergola is envisaged as a new urban reference point, a place that restores a sense of belonging and identity, capable of generating relationships and strengthening the bond with the territory. More than a simple building project, it offers a replicable model: a demonstration that, even at a local scale, architecture can become a tool for care, inclusion, and innovation—returning to the community not only buildings, but shared spaces for daily life and for the future.