La gioia di scrivere. Tutte le poesie by Wisława Szymborska

«The 2005 Faro Convention marks a trend towards the implementation of community agency in the processes of safeguarding and enhancing bio-cultural, tangible and intangible heritages.

This definition, focused on the use value of heritage, is supported by the concept at the core of the Faro Convention, that of a patrimonial community made up of people who attach value to specific aspects of cultural heritage, aspects which they desire, within public action, to preserve and pass on to future generations. «Common goods, among others, are: rivers, streams and their sources lakes and other waters the air parks as defined by law, forests and wooded areas high altitude mountainous areas, glaciers and perennial snows the shores and stretches of coast that have been declared environmental reserves wildlife and protected flora archaeological, cultural, environmental heritage and other protected landscape areas».

In the definition of the Rodotà Commission, which has not yet come to legislative completion, the reference to naturalistic and cultural assets as common goods is defined as follows: «Things that express usefulness functional to the exercise of fundamental rights as well as the free development of the person», specifying that they must be protected and safeguarded by the legal system, also for the benefit of future generations. The semantic link between patrimony and possession/ownership – which goes to extremes with the securitization of public real estate – is challenged by the tortuous but constant advance of the movement of common goods which also affirms the theory of commons in Italy, shifting attention from belonging to use.

This vision of patrimony as a Italy’s greatest wealth – the beautiful country made up of regions that compete for territorial primacy based on the highest number of “assets” – has nourished institutional policies, has created generations of graduates in the preservation of the cultural heritage and yet it has given very little to future generations which, when talking about inheritance, should be at the center of the debate. Thus “patrimonio”, the word that in Italian is most frequently used to name natural and cultural heritage, finds its roots in a patriarchal culture in which inheritance was essentially measured in economic terms. The native land is the land of the fathers, hereditary assets pass from father to son, in Italian “patrimonial” is the name given to tax on movable and immovable property that one owns. The words country, patrimony, property all share the root “pater”, father. How miserable life is in the abuse of power

La gioia di scrivere. Tutte le poesie by Wisława Szymborska