Landscape, constitution, concrete, the last essay by Salvatore Settis
Every day in Italy are cemented 161 hectares of land, 750 thousand hectares between 1995 and 2006, amounting to just under Umbria, in a country from 1951 to 2001 the urbanized area has increased 500 percent and that with the recent revival of the House plan, seems to continue in the area of \u200b\u200bconsumption. A stone figure is so scary Settis Salvatore in his recent book Landscape, Constitution, Cement (Einaudi, 19 €). Over three hundred pages to tell what, aside hypocrisy and addiction, we all know: that the Italian landscape is on the brink of the abyss. Classical balance between nature and culture, a true monument of Western culture spontaneously maintained for generations, often unrecognizable today. Campaigns increasingly overrun by garbage and abuse (and not only in Campania), sprawling urban area that they eat in transforming ugly suburbs. How to rebuild Settis, the landscape is a modern advance from Italy of the communes where the active presence of man in the territory served as a symbol of social unity, a collective project that generates shared growth in compliance resources. The most important archetype of this story is probably the fourteenth-century fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena (Allegory of good and bad government and its effects), where good governance leads to an organized county, fertile, productive, and where each visible portion of the company carries out its task in an organic community. Cultural construction permitted by the rational development of modernity, will resume the Renaissance and in-depth on a large scale with the birth of the holistic society of nation-states.
Starting from the early eighteenth century to protect the property provisions of the pre-unification Italian states which are exported to Europe, came to include the landscape is, according to a lucky aphorism attributed to John Ruskin as "the face of the beloved fatherland." It was therefore inevitable that, with globalization and the decline of nation-states, the landscape was going to face a crisis of community flour and unable to feel part of a writing project in the same territory. That would be the case in the Western world not to invaded sites and even more so in Italy, fragile country where the symbols social identity would be gone from the landscape and cultural heritage and global virtual ground imagery of television and the web. From the community together in the name of collective progress, it would be passed to human aggregations pacified by the individual capacity for the consumption of goods produced elsewhere. A consumer attitude that sees the widespread participation in the plundering and explains the apathy with which it occurs. No more the landscape, therefore, but the sale of a territory perceived as "no man's land, depleted of its symbolic values \u200b\u200band misunderstood in its layers of history. Periphery of an imaginary virtual, where everybody lives side by side and not with others.
The real sale, how to rebuild Settis, would begin in Italy in the seventies, is no coincidence that of deregulation, with the emptying of Article 9 of the Constitution which is unique in the world, take over the republic, the task of protecting the heritage and cultural landscape. Article denied by a series of bipartisan reforms between 1970 and 1977, with the allocation of planning powers to the regions, then, with the amnesty of the eighties, and later still with the Bassanini reform that, in the reform of Title V of the enhancement delegated to the regions in recent years with the measures that have donated to the recovery of infrastructure costs to local authorities, pushing the cement to cash and, finally, with the emptying of the role as guardians of the supervisors in the Code of 2008, passing by the principle of silent consent established by the operation of August 2010.
The solution? According Settis, restore public authority, centralizing the protection and make it independent from politics. Then, the collected civilian citizens organized into committees and associations. Resistance than ever necessary, but probably insufficient. As demonstrated by a history of legal measures taken in good times but immediately circumvented or disregarded (starting out in that Article 9 of the Constitution), in fact, only a consensus on the protection could prevent the slaughter. If the destruction of the landscape - as well as the degradation of cultural heritage - is a sad feature of a country devoid of community, where everyone goes to him and where the signs are that the area returns to a looting of aggressive competition between individuals in their , what is needed is a project that is in a balance between nature and culture written in the landscape, the sense of a new collective growth. A project designed, not surprisingly, to intervene precisely the context in which Italy is back: sustainable development. Not that Settis criticized in his book, which serves as justification for further havoc to the landscape. But the one based on a fair sharing of resources that does not encourage speculation on the moratorium on the consumption of new soil, on incentives for redevelopment, the redirection of production through supply chains that enhance the specificity of the territories by encouraging a new modernity.
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