Paesaggio e architettura delle regioni padano-alpine

There is a strong and precise link between identity culture and forms of living, be they architectural constructions or landscape management methods. It is human groups that shape their own physical space but are in turn shaped by it. This is an essential link in the understanding of human affairs which has however been strangely little explored. Architectural scholars have often overlooked popular architecture as a minor, marginal and subordinate fact. The same attitude has too often been held in the history of landscape, identified with the art of gardens or with the development of events linked to agriculture. Furthermore, architectural forms are examined as objects detached from their context and the landscape as something distant from everyday living spaces; and both as disconnected from any relationship with the rhythms of the natural environment and with historical developments. Yet popular architecture and landscape (what Rudofsky called "without pedigree") constitute 990 per thousand of the physical environment in which human events took place for millennia, until the thunderous environmental devastation of the industrial era. The objective of this work is to investigate the true origins of the landscape and popular architecture of the Po-Alpine regions, examining them as the result of an organic evolution over time of the comparison between human needs and environmental characteristics. To understand who we are, we need to know our past, we need to find a family album hidden in the attics of history and in which to find the dear faces of our true ancestors. But we also need to review the images of what our countries were like, of how and why our houses, our streets, our fields and our landscapes are what they are. By rediscovering the tiring - but also glorious - path that led to the formation of our anthropized landscape, we will certainly love and respect it more. And we will also have more respect for ourselves and our communities: no longer anyone's children but heirs of a hard-working, dignified and even luminous past.