my Marche
Landscapes and Architecture

A topic that is very close to my heart lately and which is perhaps due to the fact of working in an architecture studio is the future of the villages, towns and historic centers of the cities and towns of the Marche, the latter in fact have the central nucleus , often fortified, which resembles that of the villages, perhaps less populated but with identical morphological/housing dynamics.

I don't know why Gibellina, in Sicily, comes to mind, that is, the zero or null point from which any urban planner, politician or administrator must start to reflect on the topic in question: what future awaits the heart of every self-respecting town, village or city in the our region?
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Let me explain better: Gibellina is a town that in 1968, following a disastrous earthquake in Belice, was so destroyed that the administrators decided to rebuild it 25 km further on in a muggy and marshy plain. A cast of concrete and iron: buildings in ugly 70s style, squalid and soulless, like the outskirts of a metropolis. What remains of the real Gibellina, or rather of the original village which was located at the top of a hill, is now Burri's cretto, the work of a great artist: another pour of concrete, this time gray and pure, which envelops like a shroud the hill where the town destroyed by the earthquake once stood. When I saw it for the first time I was shocked. Truly. Perhaps because I too had experienced the earthquake: in '72 in Ancona. And while I saw these silhouettes, these geometric shapes crossed by furrows that represented the ancient streets, I thought of those moments of pure terror, the roar, the moving earth, the collapsing houses, the dogs, the children, the donkeys. All dead. A shrine. But it wasn't just the sense of death that had disturbed me, it was above all the reaction, that desire to close a wound that nature had opened, in such an unchristian way: there was no resurrection, no desire for recovery, for project, of the future. Even the soul was dead. What is the soul of a country? It is also life that returns, that perpetuates itself, even if it undergoes a pause of fifty years or a century, like many old historic buildings, as happened to our farmhouses, for example.
Gibellina, on the other hand, was definitively buried with Burri. And this shocked me deeply.
The mayor of Gibellina Ludovico Correo, almost apologizing for not having rebuilt on the ashes of the ancient town, said: “ There was nothing to preserve, only the values ​​of solidarity, family, work. The rest was poverty and oppression.”
By leaving the old, destroyed Gibellina, did they delude themselves into thinking they would change their lives? By modernizing the style of the houses perhaps they believed that their lives could take a turning point? But many survivors say that in the new chosen place they were never able to adapt: ​​they lacked a square, a tree, a meeting place, they lacked the town or perhaps the soul.
Burri's work then crystallized that soul in a tragic way, making it irrecoverable. Without that crack it would have been possible to hope that someone, one day, would decide to return. Instead, Gibellina's fate was truly sealed.
Fortunately, this did not happen in the Marche region. The 72 earthquake in Ancona and then the Umbria-Marche earthquake in 1997 made it possible to recover many old buildings in the damaged historic centres, from which perhaps the patina of the old had been removed and transformed into the classic " brand old” which surveyors like so much, but the earthquake did not destroy the hope and strength of seeing once again what nature had destroyed standing, so the reaction was psychologically stronger, more marked. There are two conceptions of thought that arise from it: Sicily originates from the Greeks, from a tragic vision of life more linked to destiny, to the renunciation of redemption from evil, then typical of the Byzantine and Platonic world which was transmitted to Slavic culture until Dostoevsky's Russian nihilism.
The one in the Marche is linked to Christianity and Catholicism where man with his action can redeem his soul and save it, therefore hope is already in the land, and that hope also depends on him, not only on the destiny that God has given him .

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What I mean by this is that no one could have foreseen that the farmhouses, after the De Gasperi law on sharecropping which decreed its end in the 50s, could return to resume their residential function, now more than 60% of these have been recovered and the phenomenon is not destined to decline, despite the crisis, the demand for farmhouses is always high. A phenomenon that was unthinkable just 40 years ago. Who would have thought, in the 70s, that a decade before 2000 so many people would come down from all over Europe and the rest of the world to live in the countryside? Then in the Marche?

I remember the reaction of a real estate agent tout court when I told her about my idea of ​​transforming the Marche into a new Tuscany, even though I didn't want to make a copy of it, because the Marche was different and this diversity had to be and must be continuously analyzed and explained. The Marche is the Marche and needs its own very precise identity which can only be defined by fully recovering its history and its art, making it known.

PALAZZO We don't have to copy anyone, we don't need to. Of course, it will not always be only by identifying it in an agricultural and industrialized region at the same time, the so-called industrialization without fractures, that we could recover our identity. Sometimes it seems that our past has been deliberately removed for I don't know what reason. Perhaps due to this unnatural prudence as Leopardi said, fearing who knows what upheaval. The region was also a land of freedom and thought processes different from the prevailing Catholicism, especially on the coast, it is linked much more than one might think to the Republic of Venice, the East and Greece, infinite finds can be found in Ancona for example. The Jews found here a place where they could live and trade. It is far from a monotonous region as one might superficially think, but it is an occult, underground region, with interesting strands of thought. But precisely because it is hidden, it struggles to come out, leaving only that patina of ignorance and superficiality which, I have said several times, has become so crystallized that it will take years to change its image.
The Marche, on the other hand, is a land of culture, closely linked to its historic centres, where theaters and other historic places of aggregation and information are located: libraries.
What I have been noticing lately, with great dismay, are the wishes of some local administrations in wanting to transform the historic centers of towns and cities into new Las Vegas. In a recent interview, a councilor of the Municipality of Jesi declared that the intent of his council is to transform the medieval historic center like the city that arose from nothing about 50 years ago in the Nevada desert, full of clubs and casinos. I was particularly impressed by it

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So, what the earthquake didn't do, the municipal administration is doing: sending the citizens away. A sort of expulsion that can be described in a Greek word exoikismos , a word from the biblical language, used to designate the diaspora of the Jews. The corresponding verb exoikìzo is used in Greek (for example in Plato) to indicate the political act of expelling a city from its inhabitants. Because it is true that if we fill the historic center with pizzerias and pubs, with people talking until late at night in the streets and squares of the centre, the poor residents stop sleeping and sooner or later they go to live somewhere else. part. Maybe in those anonymous suburbs stratified horizontally like wildfire, without any urban project, without a square or a community center (like the new Gibellina) and what is lost is much more than what you think. The very idea of ​​civitas, of the social and of solidarity, of the sense of belonging, of citizenship, of the right itself, of the right to the city first and foremost, but of the sense of right and also of the duty that carries forward a nation, is lost, because It is in the city that the municipal administration meets, in the central building of the city, that is, of the urbs, the walled city, so important for us Marche residents. Practically a symbol. The symbol of what we are. So far this awareness of belonging to a city or a country has given us a vision of the past but also of the future. What future awaits us if this city puts only commerce at the center of everything? The indications will systematically be those offered by the city of Las Vegas: money and then only money. Man is only if he has money. He can enter and enjoy the center only if he has money.

Where have those initiatives aimed at attracting the young and not-so-young of past administrations gone? The ones that even gave loans at subsidized rates if you bought and restored in the historic center, and the famous fixed tax for notary fees?
All this reminds me a lot of the city of Venice, where now mostly residents (a sort of union of two words: resident-residents) and non-EU citizens live.
Venice, as an avant-garde city as it has always been in the modern era, has shown us in advance the now marked future of our villages and historic centres, and it is really sad not to be able to say: no, it's different here if we citizens don't remedy it. . Even going against the will of these reckless administrations.
It would be better if our local governments did nothing instead, it would be the lesser evil. Imagine if in this wonderful sleep of fifty years some particularly strong-willed local administrator had thought of turning our thousands of farmhouses into small casinos or similar destinations. Now we would not have this wonderful rebirth.
When you don't have better ideas it's better for everything to remain as it is, in Italy we are tired of the improvisations of politicians who are voted for by four cats, including their family members. The sense of civitas is dying out: fewer and fewer Italians actually vote, and this is a sign of the inexorable advance of Americanization.
So will the housing future of the Marche all flow into terraced houses?

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