Italy is famously the home of great food, glorious art—and lousy politics. I experienced all three a few weeks ago, as some Italian friends took me to see Monticchiello and Porano, two lovely medieval towns, one near Pienza in southern Tuscany, the other just a few minutes' drive from Orvieto, in Umbria. The fragile beauty of both is now threatened with destruction by speculative building which the relevant political powers have endorsed.
Tuscany and Umbria have so far managed to preserve their beautiful medieval hilltop towns from the kind of disfiguring modern construction which has wrecked most places in Italy south of Rome. New building developments have been rare, and have usually been discreetly hidden: towns such as Arezzo, Siena and Orvieto all have their share of hideous new developments, but they have not damaged the old centres or the wonderful views.
That policy is now about to change. Local councils in Tuscany and Umbria have agreed to a rash of very visible schemes. A housing estate has just gone up outside the walls of Monticchiello. It wrecks one of the most glorious vistas in Tuscany. Initiative Toscane, the company responsible for it, claims the estate will provide much-needed housing for locals, but the prices guarantee that it won't: the only people who will be able to afford to buy apartments will be rich people from outside the area. Comitati Toscani per la difesa del Territorio, a group formed to try to protect Tuscany's heritage, has compiled a map of new developments in Tuscany—and there are hundreds of sites under threat from speculative building of the ugliest kind.
In Umbria, it is the same story. In Porano, near Orvieto, for example, a new development has been approved by the local authority, and construction appears inevitable. It involves building houses in the valley in front of the town, along with a road that will ensure that cars can whizz from the nearby Milan-Rome super-strada to the new homes.
Furthermore, in the long term, speculative building of this sort will, by destroying the region's distinctive beauty, remove any reason tourists have for visiting it. But no one in power seems to be thinking about this. Instead, they appear obsessed with "modernisation"—ignoring the fact that the whole charm of the area consists in the fact that it has escaped "modernisation," at least insofar as this means replacing old buildings made from marble and clay bricks with concrete and steel houses.
The inhabitants of Monticchiello and Porano that I met expressed a sense of despair at their inability to have any influence at all on the decisions taken. Whatever local people say or do makes no difference, they say: the council simply ploughs on. There is a spectacular example of that attitude in Florence, where the mayor is putting a tram through the middle of the Piazza del Duomo, despite a poll of the city's inhabitants which showed that they were overwhelmingly against it.
We in Britain have no grounds for feeling superior. Photographic evidence indicates that up until 1950, many of our towns were full of architectural gems. Many were obliterated in the 20 years between 1950 and 1970, when our local authorities decided to rebuild the town centres around cars and shopping centres.
Now it seems that the Italians are following our model. New houses and buildings may well be necessary in Tuscany and Umbria—after decades of losing inhabitants, the success of tourism means the regions are finally attracting people back to settle permanently—but do they have to be made in the image of the hideous housing estates and shopping centres which have so disfigured British towns?
The local authorities in Italy appear to have accepted that they must. You can see how this happened. Few architects know how to integrate new constructions harmoniously with old ones. Across Europe and North America, the architecture profession has, since 1945, generally disdained the traditions of the past. The result is that architects are trained to build glass boxes, concrete towers and Lego-style houses. What they do not know how to do is to design new constructions that will fit in with medieval or Renaissance buildings. Which means that local authorities claim that the choice is ultra-modern, clashing buildings—or nothing.
They are wrong. There is a third option: sensitive construction which does not do violence to the monuments of the past which stand alongside it. That requires careful thought about how new designs will fit with older ones, a reversion to older building materials, and a repudiation of some of the dogmas of today's architecture.
