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Chapter 14 Nature Preservation and Protection in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Italy, 1880–1950 Luigi Piccioni Anticipation, Censorship, Regression, Revival Italian environmental cultures of preservation and protection have a dramatic and erratic history. The beginning of this history coincides with the first wave of European environmentalism, in the years bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The accomplishments of this phase led to several successes that by the early 1920s were putting Italy in the vanguard of European policies for environmental protection. However, the continental crisis of preservation that followed World War I proved more serious in Italy than elsewhere, with the Fascist regime suffocating special interest groups and bureaucratizing institutions of environmental protection to the point of paralysis. The Fascist decades would in turn influence the culture and politics of the post–World War II period to the extent that, even as most European nations were making up for their earlier tardiness, Italy went through another two decades of political and institutional negligence. A true revival came about only after the mid-1960s in a context marked by such complex events as the so-called economic miracle, the reform of  | Luigi Piccioni Center-Left governments, the penetration and rapid diffusion of AngloSaxon environmental culture, the emergence of mass movements sensitive to quality-of-life issues, and the establishment of twenty semiautonomous “regions” within Italy. Unlike most northern European countries, Italy’s experience with preservation at the end of the twentieth century began reflecting structural weakness and fragility.1 A Cosmopolitan Dimension The history of environmental preservation and protection in Italy cannot be correctly understood if it is not set, from the start, in both European and worldwide contexts. The modern culture of environmental protection started in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the United States and Europe, but with cultural connotations that differed from area to area and that took very independent paths on the two sides of the Atlantic. In the United States of the mid-nineteenth century, environmental concern was embedded in an idealized vision of pristine nature, which ended up constituting a fundamental element of the young nation’s identity. European colonists in the Americas came to believe they were confronting enormous, seemingly uncontaminated spaces, thereby contributing to a collective imagination in which large land expanses became fixed in the national psyche. But in the case of environmental protection in western Europe, especially of industrializing north-central countries (which also enjoyed the political and cultural leadership in the Old World), modern Italian environmentalism started from an extremely old, anthropocentric attitude toward nature that was much less willing to confront indomitable, powerful natures, either real or imaginary. As a result, various forms of nature appreciation and subsequent efforts for its protection followed different channels and displayed different manifestations. One of these was the cult of country life, typified by English society, which became even stronger when faced by the dramatic social and environmental consequences of nineteenth-century urban trends involving the middle and urban working classes.Aesthetic appreciation of nature—such as the beauty of landscapes, picturesque places, and national monuments—was likewise a central theme of environmental awareness in Europe. Another popular trait prevalent in Great Britain was sympathy for nonhuman forms of life.2 The sense of sight was rather fundamental in all these concepts of nature, but it must be emphasized that they all involved natures transformed by centuries of human labor, according to the individual needs, habits, intellects, and artistries of local communities and their genius loci. The concept of a national monument, also popular Nature Preservation and Protection, 1880–1950 |  with U.S. preservationists, located its European distinctiveness in humanmade objects bathed with historical significance. The preceding distinctions delineate a European system of categories whereby cultural and natural phenomena blended together, representing values that were simultaneously aesthetic, atemporal, and patriotic in a very broad sense. John Ruskin’s idea that landscape is the “beloved face of the homeland” referred precisely to its constituent dimension, which rendered it the fruit of ancient wisdom and of the people’s spirit molded by collective identity. Landscapes, natural attractions, picturesque places, and monuments became integral to the French romantic concept of patrimoine , the great heritage that centuries of civilization left on the land and in which each country reflected and nourished itself. Patrimoine had as its core the masterpieces of visual, sculptural, and monumental art, but it gradually came to include a wider range of objects, both cultural and natural , as long as they were imbued...

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