Artistic and landscape masterpieces, great and small knowledge (including culinary ones) are the treasures that UNESCO protects and enhances. For this to continue to be a wonderful world
With its mountains and waters full of stories and natural treasures, it is not surprising that the territory of Lake Maggiore includes five Unesco sites (often shared with the neighboring Lombardy), rightly defined as having "exceptional universal value". Among them, the Sacro Monte of San Francesco, to Orta San Giulio, on the eastern shore of that gem that is the lake of the same name. An articulated path of chapels and sacred architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is a place of devotion and one of the most complex concentrations of all the elements that make a landscape unique. Erected in a spectacular panoramic position, the twenty frescoed chapels are inhabited by over 370 life-size terracotta statues that tell – unique case – the life of the Saint. We are in nature and art, in history and in the present. We are in the landscape.
But what is the landscape? Is it really only what we mechanically contemplate around us? If it were a physical-optical phenomenon, wouldn't the world, and with it our existence, be rather limited? And yet, this is often what happens, because one of the paradoxes of this anthropocene lies in the way we see. Ours is the civilization of the image, we see a lot, continuously, but badly, quickly, superficially. To use a "gourmand" metaphor, ours is a bulimic vision: everything is swallowed, now gorging, now nibbling, and the landscape, any landscape, we do not "look" seriously, squeezed as it is on the smartphone screen while the interest in the presumed beauty of a place lasts as long as a selfie.
In fact, we don't really know. But the landscape, as the Sacro Monte of Orta San Giulio, it is not just an event, it is an experience that involves all the senses: of course, the view, then there are the smells (of nature like those of the kitchen), i sounds, the contact with things, the great and small works of human ingenuity of yesterday and today, i flavors of food ("Eating is incorporating a territory", said Jean Brunhes, the geographer who created the concept of "human geography"); then, again the emotions, i remember that all this gives rise to and that continue even after that landscape is no longer in front of us. Synthesize well Paolo D'Angelo, in his Aesthetics of nature. Natural beauty, landscape, environmental art: "The aesthetic, historical and cultural identity of a place is a constantly changing work of art, of which man is, for better or for worse, the main manipulator".
To this problem theUnesco has been remedying for fifty years by identifying, protecting and thus transmitting to future generations the cultural and natural heritage from around the world. With extraordinary results: of the 1121 sites recognized in 167 countries, 55 are in Italy, on a par with China. With the particular that China is about thirty times the size of our country, so that the concentration of goods – both material and immaterial and yet real – in the mistreated "beautiful country where the yes sounds" is truly unique, and should be included our gastronomic tradition is also fully entitled. We are our senses, the emotion and the memory that relives everything. We are "the" landscape. And only in this way is the pleasure of (re) being in reality truly unbeatable.
by Paolo Lavezzari
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