Accessibility of the Tourist Information Office in Pavia: a contemporary ramp for a medieval building

The historical buildings of high quality are often redeveloped to hold Museums, Showrooms (more or less temporary) and Congress Hall, functions that support the cultural tourism, hardly increased in the last years. As a matter of fact, the extension of the life, the single European Currency, the low-cost air company and the facilitation for the travelling are some of the causes that increase the tourism for cultural events (exhibitions, world exposition, concerts, sports events, etc.). Elderly, families with children (and strollers) and persons with disabilities (both motor and sensorial) enjoy the cultural tourism; these kind of users can face some difficulties to benefit from historical buildings in a safe and autonomy way for their impairments or for the formal and material characters of the buildings; it has to be remembered that the ONU Declaration of the rights for the Persons with disabilities (2006) reconsider the meaning of disability, that has to be considered not as a personal feature but as the result of the interaction between the human being and his environment in a precise moment. The differences in height of the pavements, usually overcome with steps, that in the historic building are not always regular, are some of the conditions that can create some difficulties to the weak users. The overcome of the differences in height is one of the most important topic when developing a project on historic buildings, especially if they have a high cultural meaning. In the reusing and restoration projects, the accessibility and the usability has to be assured to a largest number of users and also to respect and to valorise the building, or the environment, inserting the aids that allow to overcome the differences in height. To reach this result, an aware approach has to be followed, oriented to the building honesty and reversibility, without loosing the quality of the intervention. The paper wants to stress how the ramps are the best solution to overcome the differences in height less than 1 m, under which they are universal and they don’t depend on electricity or mechanic components. The final part of the paper presents the solution realised in November 2017 in Pavia, a town 30 km south from Milan, that allows to enter in the Touristic Information Office, located in the ground floor of the Broletto, building that in the Medieval period was the house of the Lord. The ramp is the result of a participated process that leads to a project that shows all its belonging to the XXI Century but it is also reversible