The Castle
Zena Castle
Model of restoration and re-streamlining of a historical building
Zena Castle is located in the plane between Fiorenzuola and Piacenza.
It is made up of six historical buildings with a total surface of 4,000 square metres, in a green area of about 20,000 square metres..
It is next to a farm of about 40 hectares, in an area rich in beautiful landscapes.
Almost all the buildings and surrounding areas are under restrictions because of their historic and architectural value and the main building – the castle – is adorned by many frescoes.
As well as being a vestige of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it is today a point of reference for research, studies, reflection about the restoration, streamlining and enhancement of constructed cultural heritage.
This cluster of historical buildings, thanks to the innovative project being carried out, presents itself as a great showcase of technological, plant-engineering as well as restoration-related solutions and provides a great opportunity for the aggregation of industrial partners interested in various topics related to the enhancement of the construction heritage.
The old and remarkable tradition in the field of restoration – that is typical of Italy and its institutions and that has been put to the test over many decades of intense work on this heritage, unique in the world – has not always had the benefit of an equally remarkable technical expertise for the re-streamlining of structures and buildings of high historical, artistic and architectural value.
To this day, in fact, despite the fact that there is a strong tendency, both in the public and private fields, to intervene for the preservation of a heritage which, if left to its own, is constantly in danger of deteriorating and fading away, industrial research on a plant-engineering level, has not yet brought about the evolution that would have been necessary.
In this sense interventions aimed at ensuring a high level of compatibility between the most updated technological level and the aesthetic and structural aspects of historical buildings are still quite irregular and are not always up to the level expected.
In many cases the difficulty in finding functional solutions has made it necessary to renounce identifying public and private usages with some kind of financial prospect for buildings with historical value, thereby reducing the intervention, in the best of cases, to forms of simple preservation which are valuable, but not sufficient for ensuring the financial endurableness that is a condition that cannot be renounced for the very preservation of the cultural heritage.
This is one of the basic reasons that – together with the opportunity of having in Zena Castle a broad range of issues and possibilities – led the owners, from the start, to a firm project, to prefigure a research programme (S.O.C.R.A.T.E.S.).
Its aim is to deepen the project of preservation and enhancement and to apply innovative methods, tackling as central topics the usage of energy conservation, plant-engineering supply, functional solutions in the context of historical buildings, a picture of general compatibility with the existing heritage and the surrounding environment.
Our ambition is on the one hand to carry out an intervention that, through experimenting with new technology and applications, may represent a model with a general interest and on the other hand to build a permanent cluster of industrial partners and skills capable of orienting and supporting – also professionally – these projects of enhancement.
In this sense it can contribute to orienting public and private owners of historical buildings in identifying the best opportunities for their projects of recovery and re-streamlining of their properties. Furthermore, with this spirit, the objective of involving in the study and realisation of plant engineering solutions qualified firms interested in taking part by deploying their skills and experimenting by applying their own technology, takes on particular significance.