Journalist

Imprenditori benemeriti

Restoration is in the first place an ecological operation. And therefore, in a hyperconsumeristic society in which the logic of buying, consumption and using once, throwing away and buying again, it is also a moral operation. The Italian landscape is too built up, admonished the pioneers of modern environmentalism in the Sixties, down to the times of Italia Nostra (an Italian Heritage association), the campaigns of Antonio Cederna and “Espresso” against the property speculators, the sack of Rome
and the concretisation of the Ligurian coasts just as in Sicily.
They said it then but the awareness of this serious physical and visual pollution is the passion of a few, the attention of a minority often labelled with snobs, elitists or even fundamentalists. As if defending the integrity of the landscape had something to do
with the new forms of fundamentalism.
And yet no. Defending the Italian landscape, old city centres, individual districts or high-quality buildings is still a task of searing topicality. And none the less for promoting great contemporary architecture, good urban fabrics for our cities. There will never be a real culture of the contemporaneousness of quality if when we look at the past we do not learn to select the important from the unimportant what deserves saving and what can be demolished without losing very much, on the contrary perhaps, gaining something into the bargain.

Restoration costs more than building from scratch, it is said. It is like that because restoring is a cultural activity. The rescuing action is the added value to be precise and culture in every field, from symphonic music to book publishing, calls for increased costs. All entrepreneurs who, from traditional building move onto building with an added value (and the restoration of a Veneto villa, of a decommissioned factory from the beginning of the last century, of a deconsecrated church, or even just an old newsstand, as the Fondo per l’ambiente italiano (the Italian Environmental Fund) has taught us, means precisely this) become well-deserving entrepreneurs. The single act of recovery and rescuing of an important piece of the precious Italian architectural tradition becomes added value for the reputation of the entrepreneur
himself and his firm. All the more so when it comes to profits, those of an entrepreneur who is operating on the real market, not on a market that is protected and subsidised.
Anyone dedicating himself to architectural restoration with love and philological rigour is performing an act that at first risks being disadvantageous but in the mid term promises to pay for itself.
With that extra value that is the label of the illuminated company or illuminated entrepreneur. A word that spread through Italy many years ago in the days of Adriano Olivetti, but that in my judgment is more topical, more necessary and more valuable
than ever. Above all here, in Italy, where a week does not go by without the announcement of a ruining, an environmental neglect.
Not just with regard to a viaduct left half finished because of the Calabrian mafia or the environmental monster of the moment, that is to say in the most clamorous cases amplified by the system of the media to clean its conscience but also in the face of the smallscale daily degradation of our urban and suburban landscape, in unpunished banality of the estates of small houses and the host of non-places in the metropolis. The most widespread. The hardest to combat.

Enrico Arosio