PUBBLICO & PRIVATO/by Tomaso Montanari
What have we learned from the Covid emergency, as far as our relationship with cultural heritage is concerned?
Perhaps the first thing we have learned is that our private life is not enough. Literally closed in our own private life, we have experienced to the full the impotence of this privatisation of everything: family versus family, nation-state versus nation-state, interest versus interest. The illusion of perpetual connection was not enough to hide the clear perception of a tremendous loneliness, in which everyone had to save themselves by fighting illness and poverty with small, inadequate and powerless weapons because they were individual and not collective. Private, indeed. From the ‘everything is public’ of Sixty-eight we have now come, at the end of a global ultra-liberalist thirty years, to ‘everything is private’.
“Freedom is like air, one understands its importance until it begins to be lacking”: when the most fragile ones (and therefore the most precious) lacked air literally because of the cursed virus, and we all lacked the freedom to go where we want, this famous phrase that Piero Calamandrei said to Milanese students in 1955 came back to mind. It explained that the Constitution was precisely that: air and freedom that had been missing for twenty years. In the 1930s, Calamandrei and a group of friends (the Rosselli brothers, Leone Ginzburg, Benedetto Croce, Luigi Russo and many others) left the cities infected by Fascism on Saturdays looking for freedom in the countryside and monuments. The Constitution, then, with Article 9 protecting public space (the landscape and the historical and artistic heritage of the Nation), solemnly said that our being a community is also founded on the places that shaped us as such while we were building them.
Well, maybe now that experience doesn’t seem so picturesque anymore: maybe in these months, we have understood better that public streets, monumental churches, parks (and therefore the landscape, the environment) are something more than mere containers: they are our common soul, our collective democratic identity. A soul that is mirrored especially in the squares. “The abundance of squares in Italy and France is explained by a mixture of climatic conditions and attitudes of their respective peoples: it is no coincidence that Rome and Paris are the cities we associate with the idea of the perfect public square. But almost identical climatic conditions can also be found in Greece and Spain, where, however, there are no comparable historical squares, if not borrowed from Italy and France. It is the importance of the dimension of political life in Italy and then in France that determines the birth and development of this type of urbanism” (Paul Zucker, Town and Square, 1959). Running through the large Italian squares during the days of confinement – deserted, and therefore so similar to those depicted in Giorgio De Chirico’s metaphysical cities – one could almost see with the naked eye the deep interweaving that links space and community: politics comes from ‘polis’, which in Greek means ‘city’.
The Middle Ages of communal freedom, of cities whose air makes us free, built the squares that still shape our imagination today. Let’s think of what is perhaps the most beautiful in Italy, Campo di Siena: a great theatre, capable of welcoming all citizens. A square that has the shape of the Virgin’s mantle, divided into nine segments to recall the government of the Nine: but above all the scene of civic self-consciousness. A first parliamentary hemicycle.
Here is the point: the relationship between heritage and politics. Our contempt for politics (which unfortunately is based on many good reasons) has perhaps made us forget that the solution is not to imagine society as a sum of private individuals, but rather to found the State again. A just state, a state capable of functioning: a different state. But a State. In recent years, the Ginori Museum in Florence has not found a private buyer capable of buying it, saving it, relaunching it. The State had to do it. When the legendary Alinari photographic fund was on the point of being dispersed, the Region of Tuscany had to buy it. No private buyer came forward. And now, Covid has dropped the mask on yet another myth. The Egyptian Museum of Turin, the first public museum given to a foundation under private law, is in danger of dying: without its 600,000 euros in receipts per month, it does not know how to pay the salaries of its 55 employees, nor how to pay for the utilities on which the material conservation of the collections, still publicly owned, depends. None of the Foundation’s local members – the Piedmont Region, the City of Turin, the Compagnia di San Paolo and the CRT Foundation – can or want to take on the salvation of the museum and so Minister Franceschini is looking for state funds to guarantee it. That is why centuries of history had led us to think that certain particularly precious goods – health, with its intensive therapies, or museums – should be guaranteed by the state, which is not dependent on the market. While we lacked air and walks in the squares, we may have remembered this: you can’t save yourself.