La conoscenza per il restauro della Torre della Guardia di Castel Nuovo a Napoli: sicurezza strutturale, conservazione e nuove prospettive d’uso

As the outcome of a postgraduate thesis in Architectural and Landscape Heritage, this paper presents the knowl-edge process, aimed at the proposal of a conservation project, of the Torre della Guardia of Castel Nuovo in Naples. The investigated tower, together with the others of the Neapolitan fortress, constitutes significant evidence of the decisive role that the updating of military techniques and the contribution of foreign craftsmen had in the architec-tural redefinition of the castle founded by the Angevins during the Aragonese domination. Currently, centuries of physical and functional transformations, together with conservation issues, hinder the use and limit the understanding of the historical value of the Torre della Guardia.The research enabled a comprehensive understanding of the tower and of its role in the wider system of the castle, as well as the investigation of its more recent and lesser-known transformations. Data on previous interventions, together with historical iconography, made it possible to reconstruct the evolution of structural damage over time, whose current state was clarified through instrumental surveys. These surveys were primarily used to define the geometry of the structure and to detect its material and decay characteristics, and were fundamental for the pre-cise mapping of cracks and deformations.The information gathered during the analytical phase led to the definition of an intervention proposal that reinter-prets the new data as design opportunities, and at the same time meets the requirements of reuse, structural safety and accessible fruition.