Domus concludes the year with a special issue dedicated to Italian heritage

A slender yet tenacious thread binds architecture to democracy. A bond that Italy has solemnly enshrined in its Constitution, placing the protection of the nation’s landscape and historical and artistic heritage among its fundamental principles in Article 9. This was not a rhetorical or ornamental choice. It expressed a profound awareness that emerged after the war, when the Constitution’s framers from opposing political traditions, such as Concetto Marchesi and Aldo Moro, recognised that preserving the collective memory and the environment is an essential precondition for building an informed citizenry and a democratic community.

It was above all a revolutionary insight. Cultural heritage is not the property of the few, nor should it be subordinated to vested interests. Caring for it becomes an instrument of emancipation that guarantees everyone’s right to understand their identity in space and time and be part of the community, regardless of economic, social and individual disparities.

Yet, 78 years after the constitution was promulgated, the bond between preserving architecture and democratic practice is fraying. Although Italy has a record number of UNESCO cultural sites (55, compared to China’s 41), the contradiction between declarations of principle and reality has become a pathology. Neglected artistic monuments, desecrated landscapes, violated historic centres, and monstrous suburbs record the necrosis of what we love to call the “Belpaese”. Resulting in its reciprocal opposite, a place of neglect and violence, ignorance and abuses, where particular interests continue to triumph over every idea of community, respect and justice. As well as a strategic vision.

Some countersignals do exist. Stories of resistance and inversions of trend. This issue of Domus gives an overview of them, as it does every December, reporting on private and public projects from across Italy that embody a vision of care, respect and reclamation that are crucial in overcoming false alternatives.

Conservation against development, protection against promotion, memory versus innovation. This is because Article 9 of the Constitution established that the promotion of culture and the protection of heritage are complementary; that we need to preserve the past to plan wisely for the future, seeing conservation not as a constraint but a strategic resource for the quality of urban life, the identity of communities, and the economic attractiveness of the land. And respect for nature, which has to be more than the hideous “urban decor”.

After the examples, practical tools are needed. First of all, a national law for architecture (France has had one for over 40 years, Italy is still waiting), one that recognises architectural design as a common heritage of primary public interest. Then adequate resources are needed, not just for extraordinary projects, but also for routine maintenance, thereby preventing decay and neglect, the true causes of the devastation. Finally, we need to modify the powers of the Heritage offices, while training both new and traditional professional skills in the fields that remain at the heart of our identity, such as art, landscape and history.

Inevitably this brings us to politics. We urgently need to answer a radical political question. Apart from slogans, what do we Italians want to be? A society capable of cherishing its values, or one that intends only to consume them, like spaces, products, feelings, and ideas? Among the private projects entrusted to well-known and lesser-known practices, this issue offers two political answers. One comes from the mayor of Perugia, Vittoria Ferdinandi. She has brought in Toshiko Mori, a Harvard professor and the guest editor of Domus 2023, together with a group of students to rethink the city. The other is the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, who has enlisted Stefano Boeri to imagine the capital in 2050. But the final question is addressed to us. And the answer will say a lot about our maturity and that of our democracy. Because those who fail to preserve their own memory have given up caring about the future, abdicated responsibility to future generations, and are ready to fall prey to the seductions of the demiurge who morphs into a tyrant. As history, if studied, teaches us.