Uniurb – 28 gennaio Conference by Salvatore Settis

Friday, January 28 at 11am in the Throne Room of the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, Salvatore Settis, from the Scuola Normale in  Pisa, held a conference entitled "Protection of cultural heritage and national identity".
The event is part of the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification,  under the patronage of the Superintendency for the Historic, Artistic and Ethno-anthropological Heritage of the Marche region.

We have reflected and discussed upon the topic of landscape with the contribution of interventions  by Salvatore Settis.

Salvatore Settis, archaeologist and art historian, since 1985 professor of classical archeology and art history at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, for eleven years, he was also Director, a position he left last October, at the beginning of the new academic year. Also controversial was the resignation in February 2009 from the Higher Council for Cultural Heritage and Landscape at the Ministry of Culture Heritage, where he had been President since 2006.

In the tv programme “Che tempo che fa” he presented his latest book “Landscape- Constitution Cement - The battle for the environment against degradation”.

The topic of landscape is of great interest at the moment and  the subject is producing a lot of  literature.
The risk is that we are running to irreparably damage the land, and we could not leave to posterity what we have inherited.

"The space we live in is never 'neutral'. It was natural space, with its continuity and its disruption, until men started to impress their signs, turning it deeply to their likeness. The space of man (...) is the reflection and memory of history and society, indeed of history and society that have shaped it through the ages, that shape it today for tomorrow’s men and women". 
(From Landscape Constitution cement, Salvatore Settis, Torino 2010)

The cement is covering an area overly large and not proportionate to the needs of man, only in Italy during the years 1995/2006 it  consumed an  area as large as Umbria (Istat).
The difference with the past is that our ancestors jealously guarded and moderately used it.
Speaking of our region, the landscape suggests with its shape the profile of its inhabitants who lived until a few decades ago in symbiosis with the earth. The sacral consideration with which they have given the crops a strict, linear, geometric shape, the correct location of any building in harmony with the environment reveals their essential, practical and efficient character.

The territory, and then the landscape, exactly mirrors the population that inhabits and transforms it. The modern civilization is more responsible for the alteration and transfiguration of the landscape than all previous eras, with the obvious result of having depleted the heritage  that previous generations have left us.

From our point of view   it is important for  us, as students,  and our contemporaries to be aware  of environmental issues. As a consequence  we have thought of some initiatives that could suggest a reflection  and  by combining the matter with artists, environmental historians and scholars that have dealt with  this theme.