Protection of Cultural Heritage and Urban Development. Catania and Syracuse in the
Seventies: A Comparative Approach
Melania Nucifora
The cities investigated here are situated in the eastern part of Sicily, an area that
changed considerably in the seventies in various ways, especially concerning the economy.
The recession that affected the local economy over that decade put an end to a period
of unprecedented prosperity. The signs of change, which were already starting to appear
towards the end of the sixties and took shape in the years that followed, also touched
the issue of protection of cultural heritage and historic urban landscape. Important
innovations involved the objects, actors and strategies of protection, the culture
of conservation itself and, finally, the nature and dynamics of the conflicts around
the historical heritage of the cities in question.
In order to understand the nature and limits of change, we should first briefly trace
the terms of the conflicts around the landscape and cultural heritage that accompanied
the age of prosperity in Italy, as well as the political and academic debate around
the issue in the three decades before the turning point.
The Great Transformation Changed the Traits of the Bel Paese
The great transformation of the postwar period was brought to a close during the first
half of the seventies; in Italy this transformation had epochal proportions that amounted
to a transition, late in coming but swift and striking, from a society deeply rooted
in centuries-old practices, cultures and traditional values to a modern affluent society.
This in large part involved the dissolution of a rural world, which took place through
a tumultuous movement of collective migration towards urban centers that saw many
Italian cities swell with new inhabitants from the provinces and the country.
The impact of the great transformation on the cultural heritage and Italian historical
landscape was so strong that it left an indelible mark on the collective memory. The
new citizens of rural origin who invaded the urban centers, first of all, had basic
needs (housing, water and roads), little or no previous shared urban identity, aspired
to different types of consumption, and their main concern was modernization and economic
growth, barely disguising the desire to put behind them a past that for many evoked
poverty and exclusion. The country witnessed mass abandonment of mountain and hilly
areas and inland villages that made up the physiognomy of the landscape that was typically
Italian and largely homogeneous, at least along the Apennine Ridge. In this way, there
was a consolidation of that demographic and economic imbalance between inland and
coast that had more distant origins, and that Rossi Doria fixed with the vivid image
of the »flesh« (the coastal, urbanized areas where industries and services were concentrated)
and the »bone« (the poverty-stricken inland country areas and mountain villages whose
inhabitants left for the urban areas and were thus reduced to the bone).682
The burgeoning housing demand subjected the historical areas of large and medium-sized
cities to unprecedented building pressure. The system of peri-urban agricultural land
was changing rapidly and established urban areas underwent land revaluation and swift,
unscrupulous demolition and replacement. The cities underwent a transformation that
happened too rapidly, within the cities and in the surrounding areas, while the pre-war
legal framework concerning urban growth management, inadequate and incomplete, was
not immediately updated.
It was for this reason that after the Second World War the issue of the protection
of urban landscape and cultural heritage was inextricably intertwined with that of
the public management and control of the land. The protection issue no longer concerned
just individual archaeological sites or monuments, but also the surrounding contexts,
entire minor heritage sites—that is, those areas that would soon be in the national
and international spotlight.683 At the same time, the scientific debate widened its spectrum of those areas of urban
landscape and cultural heritage considered to be worthy of protection, from outstanding
areas to other parts of the region, both natural and manmade, which were previously
unprotected simply because they were not subject to threat.
Between the fifties and sixties, the so-called reformist urbanism developed in Italy, the main aim of which was to reform the national framework of
urban and regional planning. The main advocates of this trend devoted much of their
work to this, which involved not only drafting plans, but also communicating regularly
with local stakeholders. Through the effort of explanation and disclosure of planning
principles, with an attitude that can best be defined as pedagogical, the reformist
urban planners took it upon themselves to overcome the elitism of conservative discourse
and called the citizens’ attention to local government as a moment of political democratization.
Relationships between urban planners and local governments were characterized throughout
the whole of the Golden Age by complex dynamics that were often conflictual in nature.
The former based their projects on an advanced debate that had developed within the
INU (the National Institute of Urban Planning) around two key subjects: public control
of urban development and the protection of historic centers. The latter were susceptible
to pressure from local interests, primarily those of construction entrepreneurs for
whom many people worked, especially in areas where other industries were poorly developed.
In general, across the country, from the Reconstruction onwards, construction was
considered to be a driving sector of the economy for its capacity to stimulate the
more traditional forms of manufacturing and to employ low-skilled workers. Throughout
the fifties an atmosphere of great tolerance towards urban abuses and disorder prevailed.684
In this respect, both Catania and Syracuse are exemplary cases of the uneasy interaction
between technical and political aspects due to two important figures in national planning
who were around for a long time: the old Luigi Piccinato, founder of the INU, and
the young Vincenzo Cabianca, one of a new generation of planners who, under the guidance
of Adriano Olivetti and Giovanni Astengo, viewed urban planning as a social science
and threw himself into reforming the sector. The work of the INU produced a concrete
result only at the end of the sixties with the enactment of the Mancini law, also
known as »the bridge law« (Legge Ponte, Number 765 of 1967) as it was supposed to provide transitional regulations towards
a more complete urban reform that never actually materialized. As we shall see shortly,
the law established a major break with the previous period, a factor that significantly
changed the rules governing the building of urban spaces.
In Catania, and even more so in Syracuse due to the drive of Cabianca, the constant
exchange with stakeholders sought by the reformist urban planners through frequent
press reports, dedicated meetings and public debates contributed to raising awareness
of the cultural values of heritage and the local landscape. Especially in the case
of Syracuse, the explicitly educational purpose of the dialogue with the citizens
stimulated and consolidated the processes of patrimonialization that would support
the battles of the seventies, bridging the gap between a minority »party for protection«,
whose members were elitist and cultured, and a »development party« that appealed to
large segments of the urban population.
The Conflict Between Protection and Development: From Elitism to the Idea of Heritage
and Landscape as a Right
The conflict between modernization and economic growth, on the one hand, and safeguarding
values, cultural heritage and landscape, on the other, is one of the dominant issues
in Italian postwar history. It has given rise to a narrative that literature and cinema
have conveyed and fixed indelibly in the collective memory. At the basis of this story
is the harsh condemnation of the damage done to national treasures, a powerful narrative
first found on the pages of the weekly Roman magazine Il Mondo. Antonio Cederna began a new narrative genre in this magazine with his famous tale
of the sack of Rome by the new Vandals. In this tale, the urban transformation of
the capital, the archetype of all Italian cities, is represented and interpreted as
the result of speculation and corruption in a language that mocks the poor taste of
the »new barbarians« for their ignorance of the past, of history and art, and their
sad middle-class view of the world.685 The voice of Cederna, in the minority elite battle for the preservation of heritage
and the national landscape, dominated the fifties, the decade in which—in contrast—the
national political class adopted a very lenient line towards building initiatives
in an atmosphere of poor control of market dynamics and blatantly weak public intervention.
As I have pointed out, however, the postwar period also opened up a phase of great
renovation of the Italian urban planning culture, encouraged by the heated debate
that took place within the INU and on the pages of the journal Urbanistica, the aim of which was not only methodological renewal, but also social legitimacy
of the discipline. Between the fifties and sixties, this debate produced two major
policy documents: the Town Planning Code and the Charter of Gubbio.686 The former put forward radical proposals for the revision of the legal framework,
targeted to allow public control of land and the income from it so as to promote urban
growth in the public interest and respect for the landscape and cultural values. The
other aimed to spread a culture of the historic center as an organically complex whole,
consisting of imposing monuments and more modest surrounding areas, giving rise to
a planning policy that could overcome the passive and selective nature of the traditional
constraints. These documents, drawn up at a delicate time of change in the political
balance in the country, formed the basis on which the architects and urban planners
began a dialogue with the representatives of the new political alliance between Christian
Democracy (DC) and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in the years of the so-called
»center-left« (from the early sixties onwards). The sixties were dominated by this
tension of urban planners in an exchange with politicians, on the one hand, and society,
on the other, and it ended with a third important document of a less theoretical nature
than the first two, but equally programmatic in nature: Progetto 80 (1969),687 an ambitious program of territorialization of national economic policies in which
the theme of the cultural and natural heritage of Italy was directly linked to the
issue of development models and their compatibility with conservation objectives.
The new element, which formed a link between the years of the center-left and the
seventies, was the notion of heritage and landscape as a »right of citizens« to culture
and leisure. It was a prelude to the more explicit claims of decentralization policies
for the cultural heritage characteristic of the seventies, in the name of a principle
of democratization of culture.688
The Sixties as Incubator of the Turning Point. Three Key Points of the Change
The two cases discussed here reveal a stark difference in the material outcomes of
the conflict (Syracuse faced the threats more successfully than Catania where they
led to the disappearance of vast portions of the old town and the devastation of suburban
landscapes). They also show a discontinuity between the time of the so-called »centrism«
(from the late forties to the early sixties), characterized by the government of the
DC, which was in power in the Sicilian cities as well, and that of the center-left
both on a national and a local level.689 This discontinuity points to a more careful periodization of the three postwar decades
and helps to understand to what extent the origins of the innovations of the seventies
lie in the previous decade, even in their nature of rupture.
The new center-left political experience heralded a new conception of the role of
the public in the governance of urban processes and the safeguarding of public interests;
during this time the politicians began to take interest in the culture of national
urban planning that had an unprecedented opportunity in the new political climate.
The »Reform of Urbanism« constituted one of the main key points of the program of
the new governing coalition. The sixties was a time of fervid urban planning when
the planners spent a long time in the cities they were working on; the »technical
aristocracy« of the planners often resulted in a firm commitment to disclosing the
principles of reformist urbanism to the citizens.690 From these lengthy exchanges between experts and local stakeholders important new
elements emerged only after collective protests at the end of the decade contributed
to clarifying and expressing those elements in a more organized form. The particular
nature of this dialogue between experts and citizens established during the sixties
influenced the presence and status of urban heritage in the debates and protests of
the seventies.
The cases studied, with their differences (due to significant diversities in cultures
and urban identities in the long-term, and in the strategies implemented by local
political forces, both those in power and the opposition), show the sixties to be
an incubation period for some innovations that fully developed at the beginning of
the new decade and marked the seventies as years of great change.
I will focus on three key aspects of the protection/development dialectics that indicate
a turning point in the seventies:
The way of building urban spaces changed radically following the urban reform introduced
by the Mancini law (1967–68) that altered the relationship between politics and business.
From the seventies onwards, the urban development rules became the basis of a new
covenant in which a new subject entered: organized crime that raised its ugly head
in Catania in particular.
The issue of the protection of historic centers arose from the debate among the experts
on the subject and became a matter of general interest: with the ferment of mass protests
the battle took on clearer social connotations and political topics such as »participation«
and »decentralization« became part of expert discourse, producing innovative governance
guidelines.
The subject of the protection of the landscape went beyond the historical and aesthetic
dimension and began to involve environmental issues; a new awareness of the ecosystem
arose in the public discourse on protection; this also emerged from the growing perception
of the negative impact of industry.
The same factors of innovation occurred to varying degrees in Catania and Syracuse,
producing different outcomes and sometimes even opposing ones, in relation to the
economic structure of the two cities, on the one hand, and the physiognomy of cultural
identity in the long term, on the other.
Comparing Catania and Syracuse: Economy, Culture, and Politics
Catania and Syracuse are both in the eastern region of Sicily. Both cities belonged
to what the economist Paolo Sylos Labini described in 1965 as the most modern part
of Sicily: a land not yet affected by mafia crime, characterized by more modern agricultural
production and greater economic and social dynamism.691
From the early fifties, this area benefitted from grants from the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, which were more strongly oriented to industrial development after the 1957 reform
law. Therefore, both cities had their industrial development zones (ASI) which, however,
were characterized by radically different productive sectors and sizes of businesses.
Angelo Moratti set up Rasiom in Syracuse in 1949 and began the long era of petrochemical
development which would see the arrival of Esso and Montedison in subsequent years.
In Catania there were mechanics, food and manufacturing industries (wood, furniture,
ceramics, sanitary ware, and plastics—largely generated by the building sector) characterized
by small production units mostly of local origin.
There was a strong construction industry in both cities. It was a sector of transition
from under-employment to full employment and throughout the fifties it consisted mainly
of small to medium-sized businesses with semi-skilled and unskilled workers. Active
construction companies in the two cities in Sicily between the fifties and sixties
operated in a particular way which allowed entry into the market for people with little
or no availability of capital: the exchange mechanism, permuta, through which contractors reimbursed the landowners »in-kind« with apartments.
By and large, this mechanism regulated micro building operations on small or very
small lots, sometimes within residential urban voids and unused small spaces, and
generally following a system of replacing a pre-existing building with a much larger
one: owners of properties of small value (but also the wealthy owners of the splendid
Art Nouveau villas in Catania) yielded lots and allowed the building to be replaced, thereby
becoming owners of apartments with access to a thriving rental market; on the other
hand, small and very small building firms could participate in the building venture
for a modest initial investment. The social advantage was an employment demand commensurate
with the needs and supply of the local market, widespread financial improvement that
was well distributed among the population and an answer, albeit selected and dictated
by private interests, to the urgent demand for houses.
Both Catania and Syracuse saw their populations grow tremendously in the fifties and
sixties, swelling with people from the provinces.692 Catania came from a tradition of great exchange and openness to the province, with
many small and medium towns that were relatively thriving both economically and socially,
whereas for Syracuse and its ruling class the »invasion« of people coming mainly from
the surrounding country was a new and traumatic event. The great attraction was the
industrial pole north of the city center, and the areas that lay between the consolidated
city and the industries became the preferred places of settlement of a population
that formally resided in the city but had turned its back on Ortygia, the historical
part of Syracuse whose myths and rituals they did not know; nor were they aware of
the urban identity of Syracuse as a city of art and history. The life of this new
population, whilst still depending on the traditional center for administrative and
commercial services, was developed between the new working-class and middle-class
suburbs and the industrial center while the delicate network of medieval Ortygia,
unsuited to new urban functions, became the subject of ambiguous hypotheses of renewal
and modernization.
The idea of redevelopment, still present in many of the reconstruction plans formulated
immediately after the war, was often associated with the late nineteenth-century »sanitary
approach« based on hygienic ideas to avoid contagion, which involved demolishing very
old, tightly built neighborhoods and replacing them with wide, elegant avenues; this
notion had been taken up and implemented during the fascist regime. After the Second
World War, the argument for demolition of medieval systems for the purpose of modernization
and the struggle against social deprivation was strengthened by the perceived need
to adapt to traffic requirements and new living standards.
Faced with the problems posed by the postwar reconstruction and development, the administrations
of the two cities adopted opposite strategies: Catania proceeded to an adaptation
of the 1932 plan, led by a committee of notables and implemented by municipal technicians,
while Syracuse started a new planning process from a national competition in 1954,
eventually entrusting the task to the group led by Vincenzo Cabianca. The man who
pushed for this far more enlightened choice was undoubtedly the then Superintendent
of Antiquities for Eastern Sicily, the archaeologist Luigi Bernabò Brea, follower
of a prestigious tradition of international figures of scholars active in Syracuse
since the eighteen-eighties. Bernabò Brea, a respected member of the board in the
competition, became the inspiration for a strategic vision in which the archaeological
urban heritage and its monuments scattered around the city became the cornerstone
of the future urban project that portrayed the system of the historical and archaeological
sites as »a great tourist-cultural infrastructure«. From their first meeting until
Bernabò Brea was withdrawn from office in the mid-seventies, the relationship between
the archaeologist and the young urban planner Cabianca, which soon turned from collaboration
to close friendship, was based on a shared, informal but firm commitment to the continual
connection between urban planning and environmental protection.
There was a completely different scenario in Catania where, at the same time, thanks
to the activism of a part of the DC connected to the Roman building society Immobiliare
Generale, the so-called operation San Berillo suddenly took place. This operation
was carried out through the establishment of two private companies: the IstBerillo,
aimed at the construction of a lower-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city
to house the old inhabitants of the historic district San Berillo, and the IstiCa,
designed to carry out the demolition of the historic district and the construction
in its place of a very high-density business area. It all happened quickly under the
incredulous eyes of the people of Catania and the silence of the Soprintendenza ai Monumenti della Sicilia Orientale, which had its headquarters in Catania. Protected by a special regional law, the
project IstiCa established land-density standards that would influence the future
of urban planning processes in Catania, keeping the value of the land high, as declared
by the urban planner Piccinato.693 Also in Syracuse, following the example of Catania, a part of the local Christian
Democrats made a proposal for a special law that, relying on the same arguments that
had supported the operation San Berillo (social degradation of the neighborhood as
an old prostitution center), proposed the demolition of the Graziella district in Ortygia. It was a proposal strongly opposed by scholars and intellectuals
who, under the moral leadership of the Soprintendente alle Antichità Luigi Bernabò Brea, defended the integrity of the old town several times; this was
the preparation for the plan launched by Cabianca in 1956.694
Although the decades of prosperity in both cities represented a clash between protection
and development, the attitudes of the ruling elites and local politicians in the interpretation
and debate around this topic were quite different.
After the Mancini Law: A New Way to Create a City
In Catania, the interaction between the Communist Party (PCI) and the DC in the years
of intense urban growth took on a more pliable aspect than in Syracuse; while the
public discourse reflected the content, language and tone of the national debate,
what actually happened was that the local PCI tended to vote for measures that compromised
the integrity of the historic center and many sites of landscape value during the
thirty years after the war. The IstiCa project of San Berillo at the beginning of
the fifties had been unanimously approved of by the city council; similarly, widespread
amnesties for land use violation on payment of a fine were unanimously deliberated,
which closed the »golden age« in 1969–70.695 The diverse structures of the construction industry in the two cities influenced
this. In Catania, not only did it provide the majority of jobs in industry, but the
workers were the most unionized. ANCE (the National Association of Builders) was as
active in Catania as were the workers’ representatives, and both of them were particularly
concerned about the restrictive measures for construction. On the contrary, the PCI
in Syracuse found most of its voters in the field of the petrochemical industry, which
urged them to concentrate their battles on getting social housing and challenging
the political party in power more freely on the issue of urban planning and the protection
of the city’s cultural heritage.
A substantial part of the political debate in the second half of the sixties concerned
the effects of the Mancini law, a result of the reformism of the center-left. The
law Number 765 of 1967, which was enacted at the end of a tormented debate on public/private
balance in the building of the city, introduced important innovations: the charging
of infrastructure costs to the owners, the obligation of detailed plans, the almost
complete limitation of individual licenses and the establishment of quite large zones
called comparti edilizi, known by their buildings that had to be built in a homogenous way (concerning facades,
height etc.), with the agreement of all the owners. All these measures meant that
many construction companies were forced out of business and only large developers
with large amounts of capital to invest survived. The town plans that Piccinato and
Cabianca delivered to the administrations at the end of the decade, which prioritized
functional aspects and large scale zoning on a regional level, indicated the change
of scale that characterized the building of new urban spaces in Italy between the
sixties and seventies with its inclination towards gigantic infrastructure, with urban
highways, major business centers and the concentration of residential zones in the
New Town in areas where traditionally urban development did not take place. On the
political and academic level, the principle of »correcting imbalances«, which inspired
modern economic and planning theories and which was affirmed with the famous Nota Aggiuntiva (1962) by Ugo La Malfa (a true manifesto of the center-left), supported these changes.696 However, the underlying theory that inspired the Nota was not unique to Italy, but reflected the thoughts that were developing in the young
European Economic Community. From an academic perspective, regional planning strategies
were aimed, therefore, at what Manfredo Tafuri effectively defined as »the rebalancing
myth« because of the often utopian nature of plans and projects that arose in the
late sixties.697 They aimed to create urban attractors on a regional scale in order to boost construction,
especially of homes, and to counteract urban sprawl. For this reason, the New Towns
designed for Catania and Syracuse as integral parts of plans at the end of the decade
represented safeguarding tools for the landscape defenders: by polarizing and densifying
the town into designated areas, the planners of the New Towns pursued their aims to
save precious suburban landscapes (hilly and coastal) from the threat of urban sprawl
and mushrooming expansion.
The political debate around the Mancini Law and the implementation of the New Town
(the sheer size of which threatened to drain all urban resources and finances) was
equally intense but had opposite effects in the two Sicilian cities. In Syracuse,
the Christian Democrats tried to safeguard the old way of building urban spaces: individual
licenses, exchange of land for property, and small and medium-sized enterprises. While
in Syracuse the PCI fought for the construction of the »linear city« designed by Cabianca,
which envisaged the establishment of a New Town in the South, the ruling Christian
Democrats scuttled the project.698 In Catania, in contrast, the increased level of organization of the construction
industry pushed the local Christian Democrats to make the Mancini Law the basis of
a new, more evolved speculative business. Unlike what happened in Syracuse, some prominent
members of the Catania Christian Democrats fought for the construction of the New
Town of Librino that, with its large residential size and infrastructure, the impressive
labor-intensive public works which constituted an essential requirement and through
a vast system of tenders, became an aspiration for the privileged entrepreneurs who
had emerged from the cauldron of the fifties and sixties—after the ruthless selection
induced by the new law. These were the so-called cavalieri del lavoro of Catania, a small number of local construction companies whose links with the Mafia
were to emerge in the eighties after the sensational murder of journalist Giuseppe
Fava, who investigated the relationships between construction companies, politics
and the Mafia.699
The intervention of organized crime, which exploited the great building companies
in order to launder money and manipulate the job market, became part of the new pact
between politics and construction. Because of this, the discontinuity with the past
that marked the seventies was radical; this fact is often overlooked because of the
indiscriminate use of the term »building speculation« in subsequent interpretations
of these processes, interpretations that not only homogenized the entire three decades
of the Golden Age, but also assimilated the following years to that period. This assimilation
did not foster a deeper analysis of these processes nor an understanding of the changes
in the production of urban spaces or of the attitude of the political class, whose
decisions have been indiscriminately interpreted as an effect of corruption and even
of criminal intent.700
The Statute of Historical Heritage in the Age of Protest
It was not only the structural data of the urban economy that pushed the Communist
Party of Catania towards a much softer line regarding the housing mess and resulting
damage to the cultural heritage and landscape of the city. There was also a cultural
component that Giuseppe Giarrizzo has discussed and reiterated in his long reflection
on the history of Catania as a disconnection between politics and urban culture.
In Catania, reformist urbanism was well represented in the University’s Faculty of
Engineering and it addressed the issue of urban transformation: the focus of the debates,
often high profile, was the topic of land rent; much more rarely did it touch on the
issue of the conservation of the historic urban landscape, which in those years was
changing rapidly. The discussion on the management of urban transformation was, however,
largely confined to academia and in the debate between technicians and academics,
with scant ability to penetrate local politics and society.
On the contrary, due to its strong tradition of historical and archaeological studies,
the Soprintendenza alle Antichità of Syracuse became a reference point for a cluster of small cultural associations,
initially set up by an elite group of intellectuals, local and otherwise, then by
educated middle classes and finally by groups of young people who had learnt the importance
of protection also thanks to the bond that the previous generation had developed with
national associations, particularly with Italia Nostra. Without a specific academic dimension, the debate on the transformation of the historic
urban landscape of Syracuse ended up penetrating local society and engaging in politics
more directly than in Catania. The question of the future of the historic center quickly
polarized public opinion around two alternative positions, both capable of mobilizing
the participation of citizens, especially starting in the late sixties when the problem
of the depopulation of Ortygia became more evident. The proposals to modernize were
made by an ambiguous »pro-Ortigia Committee« led by the owners of grand buildings
that had dropped in value due to increasing dilapidation, but also by a number of
professionals; on the other hand, the so-called Gruppo Archeologico, led by young Syracusans who were cultured and on the warpath, quickly objected and
carried out a tireless awareness-raising campaign against the destruction and demolition
projects. On the cusp of the sixties and seventies, at the same time as the launch
of Cabianca’s second plan (1970), local non-academic professionals and ordinary people
formed the Centro di Studi Urbanistici (Urban Studies Center), of which the explicit purpose was to inform and involve citizens
in land use decisions of the administration.
This difference between these two cities in their sensitivity towards the change in
the historic landscape marked the spell of the age of protest. In Catania, most of
the protests were held by (mainly humanities) university students. The arguments debated
by students and young intellectuals of the left were well-developed and closely linked
to the national network of mobilizations, but at the same time they had a strong ideological
connotation with an intellectualist orientation, on the one hand, and an ideological
attention to the working class, on the other; however, they had a very tenuous connection
to the physical urban heritage, with the exception of some groups of the Catholic
milieu, which was heavily hit by protest and internal generational opposition in Catania.
Overall, the people of Catania watched collective movements from afar and prepared
for the »black vote« of 1971–72.701 In the seventies the process of abandonment and decay of the historic city intensified:
it would reach its peak in the eighties, when the depopulated eighteenth-century city
center remained at the mercy of petty crime while services and businesses moved further
and further north in the twentieth-century expansion areas and the radius of urbanization
invested the hilly wooded area on the slopes of Mount Etna, compromising the landscape
forever.
The only thing that went against this tendency was the start of the restoration of
the monumental complex of the former Benedictine monastery. The project got underway
in the first half of the seventies on the initiative of the Catania city council.
It would result in the redevelopment of a vast inner-city lower-class area (corresponding
to the old neighborhood of the Antico Corso and in part to the neighborhood of the Angeli Custodi). The Council discussions of that period, as well as the minutes of the subsequent meetings
with the University, clearly show that the plans arose because the city council needed
to dispose of an asset whose maintenance had become overly burdensome for the municipal
coffers.702 The divestment proposal sparked an internal debate at the University which at that
time was investing significant resources in the construction of the Cittadella Universitaria (university campus) on a hill to the northwest of the city, where it was initially
planned that the Faculty of Humanities would be decentralized and in a modern building
for which lavish regional funding was already available.703 When the initial misgivings had been overcome, the long journey to return the Monastery
to the city was completed in 1974 when the Council sold the property to the University
for the symbolic price of one lira.704 In 1976 the Faculty of Humanities celebrated the start of the gradual transfer to
the Benedictine Monastery with a party whose playful poster represented this historic
architecture in which fragments of the work of Le Corbusier were hidden with a clever
photomontage.705 The relationship between the neighborhood and the University was tense for a long
time, and there was no shortage of moments of conflict; however, the restoration of
the Benedictine Monastery soon became an ambitious cultural project of the University
that, in 1978, would bring to Catania such important architects as Piero Sampaolesi,
Roberto Pane and especially Giancarlo De Carlo, who played a vital part in the work.706 Giuseppe Giarrizzo, who was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities for many years, initially
doubted the decision of the Rector Sanfilippo to restore the Monastery. Instead he
wanted the Faculty to be in the Cittadella Universitaria (as funds were available for it). He correctly foresaw that the process of regeneration
of the complex and its surroundings would be long and difficult. However, once the
decision was taken, and until the end of his life, Giarrizzo became one of the main
actors engaged in the Monastery’s restoration against the indifference of the citizens
and often the hostility of the city’s institutions. Years later, the director of the
Technical Office of the University would effectively sum up the situation by saying:
»We could do so because the people of Catania were distracted …«.707
On the contrary, in Syracuse, a smaller and more provincial city, the new decade began
in a climate of participation and decentralization. This was due to Cabianca’s ability
to make people reflect on the future of Ortygia in an open exchange with the politicians,
the administration, political parties and citizens regarding the local historical
and archaeological culture. There were political protests but the youth of Syracuse
were much less violent and ideological than those of Catania, and there was a lower
generational conflict within the political arena that often led young Syracusans to
cooperate with representatives of the traditional parties rather than to assume positions
of rupture. The most active representatives of the local civil society took the historic
center as a key theme in the demand for democratization, specifically looking at the
restoration model of Bologna’s historical center where the preservation of the residential
areas and the protection of the most vulnerable groups were significant elements.708 The reference to the Bologna model was not exclusive of the Syracuse leftist groups:
that model was also taken up by large transverse portions of the urban ruling class.
Both mainly focused on the social strategy aimed at maintaining original residents
in the historic center, rather than the typological and morphological choices. The
Bologna model was examined and debated at a major conference on the future of Ortygia
organized by the PCI in November 1974,709 but also, significantly, carefully studied by a delegation of representatives of
public bodies, trade unions and employers associations and journalists, who paid a
visit to Bologna in March 1974 on the initiative of the Syracusan municipal tourism
agency.710
In the climate of lesser political conflict that characterized the situation in Syracuse
and which moved towards general agreements between the DC and PCI in the middle of
the decade, it was on the issue of the historical center that the two main parties
found an important point of convergence at the end of a period of intense public debate
through cross collaboration among the regional councillors from Syracuse on a regional
law for the protection of Ortygia.711 The law was approved by the Sicilian Regional Assembly in its session of 28 April
1976. This was an advanced law that followed the principles of the charters of Gubbio
and Venice. It established the extended principle of restoration as a means of intervention
on minor environments, excluding any hypothesis of mass demolition. In addition, ample
attention was paid to the social dimension of the problem, focusing on the citizens’
right to live in the historic center and the need to combine protection of the architectural
and monumental heritage with access to services and maintaining traditional productive
functions, with a view to exploiting the local neighborhood councils, which were being
set up at that time as a result of political demand »from below«.712
The Idea of Landscape: From Functionalism to Ecology
In Syracuse, the petrochemical complex and the appearance of the first pollution problems
at the end of the sixties, giving a clearer perception of the connected health risks,
contributed to a deeper and more widespread awareness of the importance of environmental
protection. This was something new. During the public debate of the sixties the problem
of preserving the landscape had been discussed in terms of the preservation of its
aesthetic, historical and cultural qualities. The public discourse that accompanied
the long planning process had been characterized by the importance of the role of
»green space« in the urban system, according to the prevailing view throughout the
sixties also present in Progetto 80, the only experience of national town planning in Italy in which Cabianca participated
directly.
An exemplary case of how this concept changed over the seventies are the projects
for the coast of Syracuse, in general, and the area of the salt flats of the river
Ciane in the area south of Syracuse, in particular. Cabianca’s project for the area
of the proposed salt flats at the end of the sixties involved the construction of
a marina that could accommodate up to 1,000 boats, »with a predominance of large and
medium sized vessels«; it was to be equipped with »a sufficient number of complementary
services«; a second landing, for yachts and other leisure crafts was expected further
south in a place called Sacramento.713 This project did not take into consideration the environmental features of the coast
of Syracuse. It was lacking in any awareness of the potential impact of tourism activities
(generally mass activities) on the delicate natural system of the mouth of the Ciane,
in which the role of the salt flats was fundamentally to act as a protection. The
way the landscape was dealt with in the new Syracuse plan was consistent with the
underlying sensitivity to Progetto 80: green space was seen as a rebalancing of the dysfunctions of urban and industrial
systems from a functionalist perspective, but an analysis of ecosystem relationships,
or an exact survey of sensitive areas (for example, the recognition of wetlands as
biological stations) were entirely lacking. Tourism, even in the case of seaside tourism
and mass tourism, was seen as a productive function that was absolutely compatible
with the objectives of protection. The landscape evoked in the project description—the
landscape for which intellectuals and Syracuse associations fought—was still without
doubt, despite the emergence of new elements, the beautiful scenery, the »framework«
evoked by the law of 1939.714 To understand the massive amount of transformation that was expected near the mouth
of the Ciane, with the approval of what might be called the party of protection, comprised
of intellectuals, scholars and associations of citizens, we only need to think that
the marina designed by the project team would have had to be equipped with »piers,
docks, pier moorings, columns with access to water supply, electricity sockets, telephones,
etc«.715 The same magnitude characterized the plans for sports facilities to be built in the
large regional park. A sports city was to be constructed »on the left of the Ciane
and Anapo rivers« to house facilities for shows and competitions and complementary
facilities for the training and care of the athletes or services for the spectators.716 Just a decade later, the citizens’ associations, including the local branch of the
WWF, would campaign against the marina project for the salt flats and for the establishment
of nature reserves in the wake of a campaign for the protection of the Sicilian coastal
wetlands and the shock caused, in 1977, by the sudden blight of the Ciane papyrus.
The campaign was based on a vision of the natural landscape that now incorporated
the debate on sea pollution that had arisen from conflicts in the industrial area,
the idea of the environmental media and an ecosystem-based vision of the territory.717 This more developed form of environmentalism, which became more widespread in Syracuse,
depended undoubtedly on the devastating environmental problems in the industrial area;
a critical step, in 1975, was the protests of the inhabitants of the village of Priolo
against the construction of a new plant for the production of aniline. Such protests
reached moments of high tension and led to the administrative separation of the Priolo
area, a fact fraught with consequences for the city of Syracuse, which lost administrative
control over the industrial pole.718 However, the constancy with which the urban planner Cabianca had worked as a mediator
between the urban culture of conservation (prestigious, connected to the national
network, but elitist) and the citizens contributed to the development of awareness
of the new environmental problems. A clear example of Cabianca’s engagement in the
construction of a shared consciousness about the urban landscape and cultural values
and their role as common goods and strategic resources, was his broad dialogue with
local stakeholders during the intensive Prima conferenza dei servizi sul piano regolatore, a widely participated urban conference about the development of the territory and
the new plan strategy held on 25 and 26 October 1968.719 Launched by the local administration and directed by Cabianca himself, the Conference
represented an important step in the definition of a shared strategic framework for
the future of Syracuse in which the topic of natural and historical urban landscape
emerged as a pillar of the new city. The 1970 plan, widely debated in many political
and cultural venues, outlined a development model in which the preservation of the
quality of the historic urban landscape, coastal areas and cultural heritage was a
central aspect and certainly formed the basis of a more aware environmentalism in
the decades to come.
In Catania, in the mid-seventies, once again it was the University that denounced
the excessive environmental costs of development with an analysis of the environmental
conditions of the urban system conducted by the Institute of Architecture and Urban
Planning (IDAU) and published in 1975. It highlighted the impact of unregulated and
unbalanced growth. As early as then, the most problematic environmental issue was
identified in the traffic system and the absence of an adequate public transport network.
However, the citizens of Catania were distracted by other problems, including the
»southern suburbs« comprised of the young New Town Librino, which soon reached the
same levels of degeneration as the historical districts; consequently, they protested
more readily on purely political and social issues rather than on the environmental
problems which are still pressing to this day.
The comparison between Catania and Syracuse shows that in both cases the seventies
represented a turning point determined by the economic decline itself, which attenuated
the anthropic pressures on the historic urban landscapes by the legislative changes
that closed the previous decade and by the new national and international guidelines
that inspired the new projects on cultural heritage and landscape. Nevertheless, the
scope of the breakthrough varied considerably from one city to another. Some differences
are due to long-term urban cultural identity and the different structure of the urban
economy in each city. Other important differentiating factors emerged in the course
of the urban planning and development processes and in the kind of public debate that
had taken place during the previous decade: the sixties can therefore be defined as
an incubation period for the turning point. One important factor was the nature of
the interaction between the two main parties, the DC and the PCI. An additional factor
was the constant and intense interaction between reformist planners, politicians and
local society in Syracuse. Finally, the attitude of urban cultural institutions and
their attention to the planning process played a decisive role. The cultural leadership
of the Soprintendenza alle Antichità also played an important role by continually pushing through crucial public interventions
so that heritage and the historic urban landscape would constitute the core of the
urban project. The Soprintendenza ai Monumenti di Catania took a different attitude, limiting itself merely to the bureaucratic function of
surveillance and sanction. This deficiency was only partially remedied by the University,
which had a much weaker role in guiding public opinion than the Soprintendenza alle Antichità in Syracuse, in part due to the different size of the two cities; however, it succeeded
in handling the complex restoration project of the Benedictine Monastery that over
time would prove to be a strong point and a model for the enhancement of urban heritage.
In both cities, the areas saved from degradation and destruction in the seventies
were given a boost in the nineties through the Joint Initiative Urban Programs funded
by the EU when the huge project of restoring the historic centers of the two cities
began.720
