Casa Rosa-Porta dei Rocchi

At the southwestern edge of the old urban core, a blocky, rectangular building performs a neat piece of architectural doublespeak. Its ground floor is a gate, a passage through the city wall, its two faces speaking different dialects: a low, flattened arch on the rear side, a full semicircular one on the main front. Above this thoroughfare, a single-family residence sits, as if the house is simply a hat worn by the gateway. The load-bearing walls are of exposed stone, honest and unadorned. The passage is roofed with a flat slab, while the building as a whole is topped with pitched roofs of terracotta tiles. It is a structure of clear, practical logic: the gate does not interrupt the house, nor the house the gate. One lives above the threshold, with the city’s comings and goings as the ground-floor soundtrack.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.