LANDSCAPES, TRACES OF PASSAGES A reflection by Italian students and teachers The theme proposed by the Comenius project "Europe

of the arts crucible of plural identities" aims at developing the integration of multiple cultures on European land that have come to constitute the richness and complexity of our identity as citizens of Europe and as distinct peoples of different nations. This is demonstrated by the numerous expressions of artistic forms. The fusion process is of course still going on and with it the evolution and enrichment of our identity. It is therefore on this route that we want to seize the opportunity to meet and know each other, doing a cultural exchange in which each partner school in the project is free to present its case, to offer what is particularly valuable about its culture in its deepest meaning and share it with the other partners. As Italian partner from Pesaro, Marche, we therefore intend to identify a specific subject area that is both of our national and local identity and that should really be recognized as our distinctive feature. The choice has fallen on the landscape. Why the landscape? For various reasons, apparently different but finally converging. The first is that we, and not only we, believe that individual or group identity is the result of relations and exchanges. Relationships of all kinds are conducted in all directions in space and time, including the major one with the territory as a geographical environment in all its aspects: topography, climate, and before that, but not in second place, as a historical and cultural context. We believe that in some way, the shape of our hills, our cities, their orientation (to the east shore of the Adriatic sea), the light, or the sea, the mountains, in some way become part of our DNA, write part of our history and make up our physiognomic character, unique, unrepeatable identity value. As if to say that everything subject to the same environmental and cultural conditions acquires a common aspect and somewhat harmonizes with the endemic fragile genius loci. The second reason concerns precisely the added value of our landscape that consists of a single harmonic fusion between the natural beauty of which we have no merit, and beauty "culture", built, with art or artifice. Ours, for example, is the same landscape that seems quite recognizable in the paintings by Piero della Francesca and in so much art of the Renaissance court of the nearby Montefeltro area and elsewhere. Italian nature and art or otherwise nature and human constructions have long dialogued without overwhelming and got married so perfectly to have no comparisons in the world and to deserve for our land, the name of "beautiful country". Beautiful country it will still be and maybe here we touch a sore point but definitely it was such in the past, so that from the 18th century, the Enlightenment / Romantic generations of young intellectuals, writers, artists, historians (remember Goethe, J. Ruskin among others), across Europe considered it as an essential step required for their human, professional and spiritual education, what they called the "Grand Tour", a long-stay, up to a year, to admire and study the miracle of beauty that is (was?) our country from north to south, stopping in the major cities as well as in the small rural towns: the beauty teaches as an example, a model of elevation and inspiration, it is tutor, the higher principle. And all of Italy was one great work of art from which to learn.

We are therefore heirs to a great past and belong to an important tradition and as such we must be aware of and responsible for what happens so we cannot escape knowledge and sincere reflection. But beyond the rhetoric we do not want to celebrate the past and abandon to nostalgia for the good and lost times, but we want to link this to the current landscape, trying to read in it the traces of evolution and modernity, an identity to be preserved from decline. The landscape is a problem that affects every level of our existence and all types of approach: practical, economical, philosophical, ethical, aesthetic, even theological, all obviously closely related. No coincidence that we speak of traces because this is the reason for the exhibition that will be held in the context of the events for the Comenius project "Landscapes, traces of passages." So we want to deal with this matter with a view extended to space and time, considering landscape as the total space of existence and not merely as an aesthetic object, considering past, present and future, making comparisons and interpreting and appropriately criticizing, also supported by a discussion of literature, the signs of our transition, the shape of our consciousness, our world view. Already in Roman law we can find those rules of civil society that still today regulate the mutual relations between citizens of a community and between the citizens and the community. Often very complex community far from the laws of nature. In Roman law there was also, for example, the establishment of private property. This is nothing but a pact to divide up territory and avoid overlaps and conflicts so that everyone will have a part of it his according to law. Well, perhaps it is precisely on the concept of ownership that we have to do an honest reflection. We should not consider it as absolute dominion over things, or as if every little property was an island, autonomous and independent from the rest. So it is also absurd to think that the wasteland I see from the window, maybe a few miles away, does not concern me as much as my little piece of lawn or flowerbed "legally "possessed. Certainly in a complex society the deterioration of the territory depends on the complex dynamics between the system of laws and the intention of the individual or of a part of the community, between public and private interests. From this conflict, a popular modus vivendi prevails, unfortunately, based on self-interest, fragmentation and ethical, aesthetic contrast. In this context it is easy to lose the sense of landscape, and consider what I see outside my fence ( any fence, physical or mental, since the discussion can be extended to other areas of human experience), as alien, other, passive rejection, excluded fragment, worthless and therefore not worthy of attention and respect. But, if were we ourselves, instead, locked in our selfishness, the small fragments, unable to see ourselves closed in our selfish perspective? The question is rhetorical of course because if the setting is correct the only possible answer is this: we are the wasteland. "The human work reflects and reveals the transcendent ideal which it directs" (P. Nemo). If the man produces ugly works, in his conscience prevails a defensive reaction and closing, and in turn this will cause the production of other ugly works. Nothing is completely inert, everything is both cause and effect and expands in space and time. So the ugly spreads, earns a place in us, corrupts us, it settles into the existing landscape, outside and inside. The landscape as any other sensory experience comes in and becomes character trait, soma. And the man also enters the landscape with his works in harmony or not in harmony with it. It is in this question that aesthetic and ethical issue coincide: as far as our living space extends far beyond the boundaries of our skin and also identifies with the territory, present and past, respecting it becomes a moral and civil rule. The deep, far and clear horizon, indisputable common good, is not only a visual dimension, the mere fact of three-dimensionality, but also concerns the existential dimension of consciousness, the psyche. There is no separation between the two areas if you do not want.

The step, if a step is necessary, from metaphor to symbol and from symbol to immanent reality and practice is easier than you think, if we accept the fact that in each fragment we can (and should) find the whole: if there is a horizon outside, the transposition is automatic, there must also be one inside and everywhere. What we are and what we think must somehow get a feedback also outside, in the visual, it must correspond to and inform the material: there is no separation, there is no barrier to limit the being. It must circulate for better or for worse. In a universe in some way all things must look alike and must have something in common, belong to each other.. I live by the sea, S. In the inland, at the foot of the Apennines and told me one day when his car went down the mountains to the coast: "... Look, from here on - we had just passed the last gorge, the sky opened and the ground sank to the plain - there is no sense for me. " He felt uncovered, puzzled, disoriented, he used to feel that way, under that mountain, with its history, with its moments, with his moods, which, with its mass, protected and hung over, announcing the good weather or storm, you could go up and you could feel elevated, peaceful, free, you could stay in peace and see far away, moved and inspired. Here, the rising, which is not only a physical muscular fact, a material and geographical shift, but also a spiritual exercise, a contemplative experience of the senses and of conscience, it becomes conception, psychology, and, when going down, perhaps to the heart of ourselves, another dimension, sacral, eschatological. The man enters into the landscape with his works, in osmosis, in symbiosis with it. The mountain , S. has it inside himself, with all its meanings, it speaks to him and teaches him, and if you take him away from it, he feels missing, mutilated, deprived of a piece of himself, offended in the body, in the spirit and in the serene solidity, though pro tempore, of his identity and existence. It is at this point that the aesthetic and ethical question on the one side and the aesthetic question on the other, coincide: our living space extends far beyond the boundaries of our skin of individuals and also identifies itself with the territory, present and past, the respect of it becomes a moral issue, civil rule of respect for each other. If there is a place, apart from the sky, in which humanity has felt more sense of the sacred that is the summit of a mountain or volcano, why? There are plenty of examples. There is almost no place or part of creation which, in some region of the world, has not welcomed a deity, a myth, a belief. The vegetation, the water, the earth, the moon, the sun, the rocks, everything is or was inhabited and animated by God: the spirituality of man, the deepest thing a man has inside himself seeks a feedback and support in what he sees outside and if he succeeds, he closes a circle of perfect harmony. Is it therefore completely wrong to consider the existence of another principle, metaphysical from the space that gathers us together and really think that creation is made in the image of this and, therefore, so are we, creatures, children, invested with a value and a sense of a precious heritage, of belonging that anchors us and keeps us together, in solidarity with creation, brothers, not separated, not splintered? Children, wanted and loved and not rejected, abandoned, homeless orphans. Is it wrong to re-evaluate the sentiment, genuinely creatural, that inspired and guided our ancestors for centuries and invested them with fear, civil respect and a sense of grace extended to all creation and not dismiss it, for the possession of a technique and technicality that make us believe we are omnipotent masters of all, as a childish, primitive and naive weakness? "... in the life of an Indian there was a duty, the fulfillment of which he never forgot: it was the duty to honor the eternal and invisible every day with prayer, always, when he meets, while hunting, an image of beauty that requires profound respect: a rainbow in front of a black cloud heavy with rain over the mountains, a foaming-white waterfall in the heart of a green cliff, wide meadows, radiated by the intense red of the sunset, the Indian hunter remains still for a moment in an attitude of worship. Everything he does has a religious significance for him. He feels the spirit of the creator in all nature , and firmly believes that his inner strength comes from it. He respects the immortal in the

animal, his brother, and this reverence extends to the point that he often decorates with symbolic colors or feathers the head of a slaughtered animal. Then he holds up the full pipe as a sign of having honorably freed the spirit of his brother, whose body was forced to kill, to go on living ... "(Ohiyesa: Native American-Santee Dakota) How can we not ask the question of what civilization is, if it is what preserves, respects and enhances or maybe what it consumes and destroys? Nature is a mother and a teacher, the moral teaching is irreplaceable for human righteousness, for his physical and spiritual survival which cannot be separated. Nothing can stand without a supreme principle, perhaps even divine, or whatever you may call it, that unites everyone and everything and that we can refer to with absolute respect. This is like the keystone of an arch: if it lacks everything falls. Faith, we can say beyond any sectarian rhetoric, is this: a structural and constructive principle, so intangible as necessary, holding everything, healing and preventing conflicts, it guarantees a state of law and not an unconditioned and unqualified free-will of the individual, his ability to oppress others, in a wild and bloody society in which, in the absence of a unifying law, incidentally, with great waste, the strongest win. Religion is human culture, and crop of the wise order of the universe: wise because respectful of life and appropriate for the survival of the community. What is moral if not the sense of what we can and what we cannot do, all with the aim to respect life in all its parts when all is part of life itself? And what is its absence if not myopia, an inability to see beyond the immediate, instant and small private interest and do our sums to understand longterm and long-range consequences of our actions and extract a fundamental principle from everyday, petty events? This is just one of the possible approaches to the subject which gives only a vague idea of its size and density of content and implications ....