Do places have a soul?
It's one of the questions I often ask myself as I look at the hills through the window of my car and drive along the roads of the Marche countryside. Then I focus on a ridge, illuminated by a particular light, a house and a smoking fireplace, a centuries-old oak tree that changes color with the advent of autumn. Quiet and timeless images that Leopardi had sung in his youth. Poetry that is good for the soul.
In the past, like an explorer, I wandered through the countryside listening to old farmhouses in search of life, I heard them tell their stories of hard-working families, bent on the earth and silent, accustomed to a hard life, always the same. And I would have liked to do something to change their fate: from lifeless places to rehabilitated and lived-in homes.
And so it was and continued to be done.
I tried to overcome the literalism that the profession required, that is, the strict adherence to objective and, if you like, unglamorous reality, to give meaning or meaning to what I did, given that I absolutely didn't want to know about dealing with properties such as: "apartments spacious and bright a stone's throw from the center", I began to see beyond, that is, to de-literalize the mere profession, meaning by this the ability to re-elaborate ideas and not reabsorb them without even having thought of them.
But was it me who gave meaning to these houses or did they give it to me? An unsolvable dilemma, and I hope it will always be like this. The soul exists for those who see it.
And therefore for me and for many these places have a soul. These hills and these houses possess and transmit so much beauty that all man can do is to keep it intact and authentic as it is, recognizing its value.
I feel the need to start a lateral path: to protect these places of soul, the farmhouses, the hills that host them and the small historic villages and to bring together people, intellectual and sensorial, in an association, with the aim of enhancing and preserving first of all the true heritage of this region: its landscape and its multiple vocation, so that future generations can draw the same or different inspirations from it.
A cultural association that tells the stories and life of these houses, that can intervene on their next destinations, that monitors the conservation of the landscape and has its say on urban planning and wild overbuilding, the maintenance of historic villages and characteristic villages always poised between restoration of old buildings and new construction without decency and architectural coherence with the old historic center. Involve and teach to see and maintain the simplicity and authenticity of what we have in this region, before it is too late, a style without artifice and extraordinarily direct, which goes straight to the heart of things, like its inhabitants.
It's my future challenge, our opportunity.
