Behated, beloved, betrayed. Modern architectural heritage and the culture of conservation in Italy

Italy has played a specific role in Western culture for its attitude to retain material witnesses of the past. Either intentionally or unintentionally, the Italian natural and urban landscape has taken shape through a continuous transformation of the existing, only rarely through demolition and reconstruction. Italian culture eventually developed a mixed-blessing critical attitude, based on appreciation, scientific judgment and value assessment of the artifacts of the past. This justifies and explains why the urban landscape is so deeply stratified, bearing traces of fairly all past eras, also providing a sound answer to the question, “Why are so many fascist monuments still standing in Italy?” (Ruth Ben-Ghiat on “The New Yorker”, 7 October 2017). Within this framework, the survival of many monuments of the recent past, in spite of the damnatio memoriae often still enacted today, depends on a specific ‘resilience’ of Italians, who prefer to apply a scientific evaluation to declared (and ancient) monuments, while cohabiting and metabolizing the remnants of the very recent past, thereby avoiding the elaboration of a critical approach; artifacts of the past century are therefore likely to survive undisturbed. This is true for iconic buildings, bearing a symbolic value for political or ideological reasons, but also for public buildings, houses, residential estates and infrastructures. Furthermore, this answer entails another wide range of questions that appear even more compelling today, as populisms are at the gate in many democratic countries. We should in fact ask why in the past two decades a number of intentional demolitions have occurred in Italy, namely of buildings dating back to the Fifties and Sixties. A series of case studies in the country culminate with the recent disastrous ruin of one bay of Riccardo Morandi’s viaduct over the Polcevera, which has solicited a radical, previously unthought-of approach of complete demolition/reconstruction. Salvo intends to illustrate shortly how the culture of conservation in Italy has fairly intentionally regulated the approach to pre-existences until today, when sneaky strategies of persuasion and uncultured governments apply to a neglected heritage that struggles to survive.