The quarrel between the old and the new, in a country like Italy, rich in history and documents of all kinds, possible and imaginable, is a daily occurrence and never ends, with valid arguments from all sides, which to call just two would be very reductive, as the nuances, sometimes minimal, sometimes striking, are so many, so many as to configure spaces, visions and positions, which often end up hindering each other so much as to cancel each other out, condemning us to unproductive stagnation. A polemic of vetoes has been created, which prevents, for example, the construction of the bridge over the Strait of Messina, a work that would change the Italian imaginary in the world, returning to us a leading role, which risks being attributed only to the past. Yet, there is no shortage of ideas, technological tools, or men, but we have to wait for disasters, like the collapse of the Morandi Bridge, to build the San Giorgio Bridge in Genoa in record time, or the exceptional high tide in Venice, to complete the Mose mobile dam, which was missing a trifle, but it had been missing for years and years.
I read an oracular interview with Renzo Piano about “continual construction” without being bamboozled by clichés, excessive checks, and a lot of bureaucracy, as well as by conceptual reactionarism, according to which everything has been done and all that's left for us is to despair. Thus, the man behind the Pompidou Centre, the Vulcano Buono in Nola and the Lingotto Tower in Turin had to pause for a long time on his Auditorium in Rome, described as “ugly” by harsh critics who thought of it as any old building and not a powerful, da Vinci-esque machine for bringing music to life and experiencing it. Why does this happen and why will it happen more and more, by dint of placing obstacles in the way of the individual and the whole, preventing the spread of a fervent and intelligent conception of the new, embalming and becoming embalmed, when today, more than ever, intelligence and imagination are needed?.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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