Director of the Scuola Normale in Pisa

A new model in Italy 

In responding to the invitation of Oliviero Toscani to say something about restoration, I can find nothing better than to remember ideas and designs of Giovanni Urbani, great manager of Central Restoration Institute, who died twelve years ago after leaving the administration in protest against the conspiracy of silence that met his daring and innovative ideas.

I would now like to try to give an idea of those designs that remained in the “dream” (or prophecy), but only because no-one at the time wanted to listen. And it makes sense to do so, not as a posthumous re-evocation or celebration of a personality even though he was so important, but to indicate the topicality of those proposals and reflections. Because even today as in all moments of crisis or profound change we must stop and think, we must choose our reference models carefully, our “ancestors” and not to venerate them but for the contribution they can still make to our designing, our future.
It is amazing with what penetrating intelligence Giovanni Urbani knew how to analyse the themes of restoration by playing on a fundamental point: the relationship between
the protection of the heritage and the economy of the country. I will now try to give an idea of his thinking with a collage of quotations.
Giovanni Urbani noted that: «The protection of our cultural heritage is unfortunately a choice that, at least in explicit and well-thought out terms, is taken on by groups that are too narrow and have too little clout at the national economic level, to have effective possibilities of prevailing over choices that contrast with it or even only indifferent in the immediate future. All the more so if to have to decide is a political class that is manifestly unaware or non-caring of the recent doctrinal progress made in the theory and practice of public decision. A theme now clearly subject to the principle according to which progress and development do not depend only on the mechanistic
dynamic of traditional economic forces, but also, mainly, on the consideration of what is good for man.»
But is the conservation of the cultural and environmental heritage (i.e. the maintenance not of isolated museums and monuments, but standards of quality that involve the dimensions of living, the “quality of life ”) good for man? I answer with another quotation of Giovanni Urbani: «What in economic terms can represent the emotional attachment of a community to a living space in existence for many years and, on the contrary the forced transfer to a new habitat where the aesthetic quality we do not want to judge out of hand but of which anyway we know that in no way can it satisfy, we are not saying for centuries, like the other house, but perhaps not even in the immediate, the very human sentiment of belonging and the identification of the inhabitant with the thing inhabited?
Therefore we are not saying that if the loss of this feeling certainly essentially reduces the overall amount of happiness given to people on this earth, a loss of this kind has no economic importance only for an economy that does not take into account moral values, simply because it does not know how to subject them to the market mechanisms.»
So, according to Urbani, a “strict” and mean conception of the economy, founded only on the logic of immediate profit and on the scorn of every other value, ends up condemning the cultural heritage without appeal. A conception of this kind is actually incapable of understanding the identity-linked value of the heritage and what is more its essential need for a quality of life that also translates into a deep motivation of the role of the citizen, of productive work and of the capacity for innovation. In this way it might happen, in the words of Urbani, that the cultural heritage, not understood as a vital element of belonging and identification, but as a superfluous ornament, ends up by being outcast, thus falling more or less entirely on an “economy of subsidies”.

But «the fact remains that it is very difficult to distinguish, at least in a sector such as that of the cultural assets, between a subsidy that is ideally useful and justified and one that is purely for show or altruistic. With the result, that is not difficult to imagine, that only the minimum intervention will always be considered justified.».
It is from a conception such as this that the most widespread conception of the restoration activity springs, seen as a therapeutic, occasional and desultory repair of things that are broken: breaks that would not have occurred if that monument, that fresco, that picture had been kept under observation and subjected periodically to minimum interventions of preventive maintenance. From this the most important proposal of Giovanni Urbani was born, his argument, paradoxically, against restoration, but in favour of programmed conservation. Therefore he loved to talk about an industrial logic of productivity applicable to conservation: «We should be convinced that the key to the problem is in creating the conditions that favour the passage of conservation from the present state of marginal activity on the productive stage to a phase of development that cannot be called anything other than industrial. (…)
The essence of industry, responds to the logic of productivity first, and then to that of machines. It merely consists of doing something in such a way that there is a rational relationship and economically viable between the things to be produced and the resources needed to produce them.»
What he had in mind was the central role of the Restoration Institute (of which, as I have said, he was director), but also of the numerous workshops around the territory to which a cognitive, diagnostic and preventive role was to be given with the necessary corollary of corresponding investments in knowledge and research into the environmental, landscape and cultural heritage. These new structures, which should have been both workshop and school combined, in his design were entrusted with the practical demonstration that the programmed conservation of the whole and not the occasional restoration of objects and monuments in isolation, is in line with the country’s keenness on economic viability.
In this conception, fruit of very clear analysis, the intimate contextual link that makes the Italian territory and environment (city, countryside, landscape) an inseparable continuum to be safeguarded as a whole is seen not as an annoying weight to get rid of with the knock-down sale of coasts, forests and monuments, but as a trigger of powerful development mechanisms that could assure the country’s image and the historical memory while providing employment to people.

Out of this was also born the need, today unresolved, to see the protection structures as research bodies providing conservation practices with the cognitive dimension of the heritage, with town and territory planning, with civil development. As he saw immediately however, the bureaucratic invention of a ministry of “cultural assets” was a negative fact that he defined «a cursed combination operating as a black hole capable of swallowing everything up and nullifying everything in empty words» together with the assignment of the environment to another ministry. His project (shared with Andrea Emiliani,
Baldini, Valcanover) was instead to reconstruct the functionality of the structures for protection starting from the territory, with “inter-superintendence laboratories” that would develop cultural and environmental heritage research and programmed conservation strategies (whence his pilot project for Umbria).
The last citation will give the sense of a vision that is at once clear and passionate: «Once brought into the environmental system, no function or position other than the one that touches every other component in the environment can be assigned to the cultural assets: becoming an unbendable resource for a development policy intended to re-establish a certain equilibrium between the socio-economic and the environmental systems, as a prime condition for the recovery of a greater quality of life or, as Bertrand de Jouvenel preferred to put it, for the “passage from a quantitative society to a qualitative society.

In other words, as a discrete use of non-renewable raw materials, water, soil and other natural component in the environment is imperative, so is it imperative to distance ourselves from that particular form or waste that so far we have made of the historical-cultural heritage, confining it in the metaphysical role of asset or ideal value and in reality giving it a pure and simple fate of material decadence through neglect and abandonment. It would be a really naïve illusion to believe that this decadence can be repaired just by increasing the funds for the restoration of the monuments and for the functioning of the museums.»

As it can be seen, this purely economic conception of the cultural heritage is at the pole of that commercialisation of the cultural assets that continually emerges, on the part of those who wanted to sell them or transfer them to ad hoc companies created to make a profit out of them. On the contrary, Giovanni Urbani championed a bill in which state and regional authorities, the “public” and “private” sectors created alliances and convergences of skills and expertise in the first place, with the aim not of the immediate monetary gain of a myopic and slim microprofit, but the quality of the natural and humanised environment with all the “induced” economic influences that derive from it. All this in terms of the mechanism of employment that this project would have generated and would probably still generate, as well as of maintaining, through the conservation of the environment and the heritage, that attractiveness Italy has to offer that is an economic factor of prime importance. What can and must be safeguarded today, from a proposal such as that of Giovanni Urbani, or better still be re-launched in a context in continuous evolution? Today it is worth insisting on the fact
that our cultural and environmental heritage is the source, on the one hand, of powerful identity mechanisms (even more in the European picture), and on the other it can generate wealth distributed through tourism and the enjoyment of culture with ensuing consequences for employment.

Even though rarely analysed, the attractiveness of our cultural and environmental heritage has always been a “strength” for Italy. However today it is in crisis, partly because the initiatives are few and far between, the system is ineffective, there is no real analysis or resources and investments, with an effect of fragmentation that robs efficiency form every single action, discourages the development of projects and the skills, and weakens the grip of the institutions. In this way, the clear dysfunctions of the public administration in protection matters have not led to a thorough study of the problems and a research of tailored solutions, rather to a continuous, disorderly resorting to ever new management models, upstream of which there are no analytical studies but arbitrary inductions and sometimes superficial impressions of foreign models (above all American), that for very precise reasons cannot be transferred to the Italian context.

The first requirement to be faced today is therefore to stem the flood of uncontrolled experimentation and ineffective and not very professional mini initiatives (with the consequent, very serious waste of resources), through minute analyses of the forms of distributed wealth generated (and that can be generated) by the cultural and environmental heritage, taking account in the first place of the various forms of induced activities; and through the specific assessment of the types of investment and spending (in the public and private sectors) and their possible interactions.
The second need is the creation of a solid and effective mixed experimental nucleus of economic and humanistic skills along with the development of new job types that marry the knowledge of the specific aspects regarding the cultural and environmental heritage and the knowledge of management techniques and mechanisms. These are both indispensable premises for the re-launching of our cultural, landscape and environmental heritage. A culture of the integration of skills is essential for the success of this project line: it must be tested through pilot projects that have the characteristic of being exportable thereby creating a project culture in the sector on new bases.
The specific skills integration culture that is focussed at the same time on basic research and applied research is certainly not absent in Italy (on the contrary, I can say that it this is the approach adopted by the institution that I have the privilege of directing, the Scuola Normale di Pisa). It is only a case of directing the best energies, intelligences and skills towards well defined objectives that can concretely be achieved.
These proposals are not just a reworking of what Giovanni Urbani proposed, but they take into account changes that came about after he died. They by no means dismiss or underestimate the potential of the public institutions for protection, but on the contrary concentrate on their enhancement through the revision of skills, of analytical and diagnostic procedures, project development capacities that integrate the best in the country (public and private), in the name not of short-sighted micro-profit logic but of an airier and more farsighted corporate social responsibility.

It is in this context and with these purposes that a new effective proposal for an overall enhancement of a new “Italian model” can and must be designed for the development and the use of the cultural assets. This can be achieved by reactivating the “cultural identity – distributed wealth - effective model” circuit that is therefore exportable; by proposing concrete methods of rationalisation of public and private spending in the field of culture; by specifying role and structural models of possible intermediary parties in the management of culture (such as the foundations) and redrawing the cognitive, research and protection functions of the public administration.

It is not an easy job, nor does it concern only us. The intertwining of territories, museums, landscapes, cultural initiatives in Italy is in fact so complex and such that, if we manage to ammer out an effective model of a national type, however adaptable to our own local situations, we will be able to expect that it can modelised and exported to Europe and
elsewhere.

Salvatore Settis