"L'arcadia riformulata": recuperare il passato, progettare il futuro nell'Italia degli anni Settanta.

The article analyses the presence of codes and language typical of the 'pastoral' sensibility in certain groups of the radical left in the 1970s. The anxiety with which people looked to the future, generated by the perception of the risk of an ecological catastrophe and the fear of the dehumanising effects of technology, began to nurture the idea of a return to nature, in order to restore the lost ecological balance and to put man and his abilities back at the center. The article focuses on the forms that this pastoral sensibility took in the sphere of so-called radical design, investigating the experiments of some groups of young Florentine architects and designers who were very successful, even internationally. The last section of the article deals with one of these projects - an anthropological study on peasant labour – and provides a concise overview of the folk revival of the 1970s