Chiesa di San Tommaso Apostolo

Often the Italian suburbs, which developed from the 1950s onwards, lack infrastructure and meeting places, shortcomings that are frequently noted, among the major causes of the failures of neighborhoods that, despite having urban, landscape and cultural values, or sometimes hosting valid architecture, have never managed to represent for the inhabitants welcoming parts of the city with a significant average quality of life.
This is the case of the Infernetto neighborhood in the southern suburbs of Rome, a large residential area bordered by the Cristoforo Colombo towards Ostia: an area near the sea in the pine forest of Castelporziano where there is still significant Mediterranean scrub. The rather unusual name derives from the use that was made in the area of ​​large charcoal kilns that, engaged in slowly producing coal, used large fires that, seen from afar, gave the idea of ​​hell. Today it is a sought-after residential area – still growing and undergoing urban development, essentially characterized by individual buildings, among other things of very heterogeneous quality – but completely devoid of public spaces for gathering, essential in our historical culture of living. If the State has been deficient in planning, the Church has recently tried, at least in part, to make up for these deficiencies. In fact, the Parish Complex of San Tommaso Apostolo by Marco Petreschi is part of a program launched by the Curia of Rome which since 2000 has activated, through some interesting competitions by invitation, the construction of some religious complexes in the Roman suburbs in neighborhoods undergoing expansion, development and transformation.
San Tommaso Apostolo has all the typical features of Roman architecture, in fact Petreschi, who in his production (among other things it is worth remembering the Papal Stage built in Tor Vergata for the Jubilee of 2000) has always related to the context in which he operated, also in this case takes into account not only the place but also and above all the functional value of the work and above all those existing models that have always represented the reference for significant places in Italian cities and urban spaces.
The complex consists of the part most linked to liturgical functions - from the church to the weekday chapel, from the bell tower to the sacristy; from the rooms intended for collateral activities: parish offices, rectory, archive, rooms reserved for the parish ministry; square, gardens, sports areas and parking lots is planimetrically based on the rotation of axes derived from the resumption of significant generators that, if on the one hand they resume the orthogonality of the basic layout on the other they bring back the typical movement of the facades of Roman building architectures. This dynamic configuration generates urban spaces of great attraction, which recall Piazza Sant’Ignazio in Rome by Filippo Raguzzini. Even the materials, the exposed brick, the travertine, are typical of the local architectural culture, re-set in a contemporary key, now with glass slots, now with horizontal cuts that permeate the light, now with staggered planes, now with blind fields.
The church space is characterized by a polysemic structure based on the square matrix, with eight circular pillars that mark the vertices and act as the base for a theory of emerging beams, which generate an alternation between empty and full spaces, in addition to supporting the roof - a sort of pavilion with cuts inspired by Fontana - crossed for almost all the symbolic transparency of the sign of the cross.
The bell tower is emerging and dominant and represents a punctual and symbolic element of strong appeal. A significant full volume with a square plan, of neoplastic matrix, articulated at times by the emptied corners, or by sliced ​​elements or by suspended balconies connected to the primary structure. The whole can be defined as a quality architecture of the city for the city destined to become a characterizing element of an area that risks degenerating into a non-place.