Time Essay: Can Italy be Saved from Itself?

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The problem of the Italian environment is not easy. And it cannot be simplified into a battle between the Manifest Destiny of industrial progress, on one hand, and a collection of well-meaning Luddites on the other. Nobody among the conservationists wants to stop the clock and turn Italy into a pre-industrial haven, a cultural Disneyland full of shiny Donatellos where everyone who is not a duke or a contadino is either a museum guard or a waiter. But there is no reason why the jobs created by unrestricted "development" could not also be supplied by rational reconstruction and conservation. The issue is planning, and here the Italians, from government functionaries to the piccolo borghese who plasters the Grosseto road with crude ads, are inept when they are not venal.

There are scattered signs of encouragement. The city of Siena became a model for urban planning when it banned motor traffic from its historic center; the members of Firenze Viva and other conservation groups were able to frustrate the Hilton chain's plan to build a giant hotel on the hills overlooking Florence. Crusading Italian journalists have done their best to penetrate the remarkably callous conscience of their public. Reassigning the priorities is difficult, however, since it involves dispensing with the "masterpiece" theory of culture and concentrating on relationships. Just as a head is useless without its body and limbs, so the masterpiece suffers in the absence of the structure from which it came —the minor works of art, the buildings, i the cityscape whose organic unity gives i meaning to cultural products.

All this must be preserved. Italy—as its government monotonously insists at times of crisis like the Florence flood of 1966—"belongs to the world." Perhaps it is time that the world's stewardship became something more than a money-raising metaphor. Italy has no lack of conscientious critics and gifted environmental thinkers; the problem is that they have no power. Unless they get it, the depletion of Italy's cultural resources will continue to be a scandal to every civilized person. For the epitaph to Italy's self-erosion was voiced by O'Brien, the state interrogator in Orwell's 1984, as he tossed a scrap of historical evidence down the incinerator: "I do not remember it."