The design is often considered as the crossroads of different disciplines. The designer has
therefore played an increasing role as coordinator of different skills, assembler of hybrid
materials, and concepts to be combined in new configurations.
Historically, the city of Naples has presented a monumental heritage, of millenary origin,
which represents a fundamental element of its urban identity. The paper aims to clarify the
issues of a particular urban experience: the use of contemporary art as a decisive factor of the
recent urban transformation of the city. That process, which went through the last fifteen
years, has at present a disputed outcome. The city has been, since the nineties, the privileged
ground testing of symbolic politicies. Here the public strategy generates a series of actions,
whose communicative factor has been taken from contemporary art. Public art, integration
between architecture, visual arts and town planning, offer extraordinary opportunities, for
the art of taking an active role in social and cultural dynamics, fueling the debate on the
meaning of the public, on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. At the same time
this cultural policy, without a temperate design management, has paradoxically increased the
distance between the creative elite and ordinary people
