Pier Carlo Bontempi

GAIANO DI COLLECCHIO, PARMA, ITALY

Translated from Italian by Samir Younés

The most frequent answers that I receive to my persistent question about what is the greatest masterwork built in Italy over the past two millennia are these: the Colosseum, Michelangelo’s cupola and Bernini’s piazza at Saint Peter’s, Piazza San Marco in Venice, the Rotonda of Palladio, the Campo dei Miracoli with the leaning tower in Pisa, the cupola of Brunelleschi at Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. Notwithstanding the extraordinary quality and the exceptional aesthetic and constructional characteristics of all these works, which are certainly fundamental for our culture and our collective imaginary, the responses are very removed from that which I consider to be the most profoundly true question. The masterwork about which I am thinking, contrary to other cited works, cannot be attributed to a single author or some well identified artifice; it was not completed in a definite arc of time; the client who wanted to realize it is not known precisely, nor have the economic, creative, and cultural resources deployed ever been quantified. The Italian landscape is the biggest masterwork that humankind has built within a very long arc of time. It is millennial, never finished— always subject to constant transformations, which are at once changing and permanent, varied, complex, solid and fragile, delicate, and at risk of being irremediably lost today. Italian landscape is a giant collective work, the result of constant work by generations of farmers, shepherds, lumberjacks, breeders, bricklayers, carpenters, blacksmiths, stone masons; builders of bridges, of streets, of gates and cities. A numberless array of artificers built it. The work lasted for the entire life of every one of these builders, and entire generations of these communities have transformed a geographically identifiable territory into an extraordinary landscape.

It is important however, to clarify exactly what we mean by landscape. Very often, in fact, this term is associated with the natural environment as it is found in those parts of the planet that have not been subjected to any human transformation or where human presence had disappeared for some time. A desert with successive dunes modelled by the wind, a canyon eroded by a river’s swirling waters, the walls of a mountain with rocky pinnacles and giant sheets of ice, spectacular cascades, exterminated and impenetrable forests are not landscapes. These natural environments, which we are able to visually perceive through our sensibility and our culture, can also transmit profound emotions. These environments, however, remain within the natural context of which humans form a part, but without us, such an environment will remain undisturbed in its incessant dynamism.

Landscape is something else. The word landscape [paesaggio in Italian] contains in its root the word paese (from the Latin pagense, a space that is occupied by the pagus, the village) which is a place inhabited by humans, a portion of territory that is no longer entirely natural but transformed by human presence. Cultivation, delimited pastures, terraces with retaining walls, the roads of communication between the lightest but perceptible paths, roads and bridges, water courses controlled by embankments and canals, barriers and dams, rock water breakers that protrude into the sea, houses, factories, castles, churches, villages, and cities are all works from the most elementary to the most refined that mark the human presence within the environment.