Vol. 23 No. 2 (2025): Nature, Myth, Design
Genealogie del mito / Genealogies of Myth

Mundus, il mito della fondazione urbana. Progettare con il suolo fra movimento e fertilità

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  • Federico Broggini
Federico Broggini
Dipartimento di Architettura, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italia
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/rv-17928

Published 2026-05-08

Keywords

  • Mundus,
  • Landscape Architecture,
  • soil,
  • Movements,
  • Fertilities

How to Cite

Broggini, F. (2026). Mundus, il mito della fondazione urbana. Progettare con il suolo fra movimento e fertilità. Ri-Vista. Research for Landscape Architecture, 23(2), 42–55. https://doi.org/10.36253/rv-17928

Copyright (c) 2025 Federico Broggini

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Abstract

This contribution aims to highlight the relationship between myth and contemporary landscape architecture,

focusing on their capacity to generate and interpret the world. The very center of attention

is the myth of the mundus – the myth of the foundation pit of Rome – which can transcend

and combine, through soil, the binomial theoretical and operational categories such as natural and

artificial, earth and sky, and life and death. When interpreted as a mundus, the project can only

be understood as an ongoing negotiation between human and non-human entities that happens

through soil. In a methodological sense, the article relates the mundus narrative and the categories

of movement and fertility that emerge from it to a collection of landscape architecture projects

in the European context from different historical periods. The soil is the matrix and material that

shapes both the myth and the projects.

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