At the end of the Seventies, I went to live there; in a small flat on the third floor in via Corfù. At the beginning of the 1980s I started my own business, and I rented a respectable office in via Cipro. On the corner of what would be called, once the construction site had been shortly removed, Via Aldo Moro. On the first floor of one of the brand new buildings that were redesigning the skyline to the south of the city, beyond the railway line.
That was the new residential and business area, which in those years was being born and expanding with futuristic architecture where previously there had only been vegetable gardens and countryside.
There had been controversy when, years earlier, a forward-looking public administration built the Kennedy flyover.
A majestic construction, over the railway, consisting of four lanes for vehicles, two sidewalks and a traffic divider in the center of the road, lit up like day at night. Most people said it was a waste of public money, absolutely incomprehensible… for a useless road that ended up in the fields.
In reality, just below the Kennedy flyover, “Brescia number two” was born. A never ending and versatile thirty-year-long construction site shaping the new neighborhood.
A futuristic urban plan composed of eye-catching glass and concrete facades offered modern homes and functional commercial spaces. Large and numerous car parks served by multi-lane roads, for a better traffic circulation compared to the congested historic centre.
For me it became immediately a matter of interest to immortalize the slow but inexorable metamorphosis of that place. The old farmhouses progressively abandoned and in ruins, the green fields increasingly replaced by new buildings, the well-aligned vegetable crops uprooted.