Pier Paolo Pasolini<br /><br />Sabaudia<br /><br />Translated from Italian 🇮🇹<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />“Here we are in front of the structure, the shape, the profile of another city.<br /><br />Immersed in a sort of a lagoon grey light, although surrounded by the stunning Mediterranean vegetation. It is Sabaudia.<br /><br />How we laughed us intellectuals upon the architecture of the regime; upon cities like Sabaudia.<br /><br />Yet now watching this city we feel an unexpected feeling. Its architecture is not unreal, it is not laughable.<br /><br />The passing of time made this Littorio architecture to acquire a metaphysical and realistic nature: metaphysical in a European sense of the word;<br /><br />realistic because observing it from a distance we could say that the city is made on a human scale, as we rhetorically say.<br /><br />Inside we have normal families, normal people; complete, entire human beings, full in their humbleness.<br /><br />How do we explain this miraculous thing? A ridiculous, fascist city that probably seems enchanting.<br /><br />We must examine this: Sabaudia was ordered by the regime but it has not got fascist features apart from the exterior ones.<br /><br />I think this: in conclusion, the fascist regime had just been a group of criminals in charge.<br /><br />This group didn’t manage to scratch the reality of Italy. So that, although Sabaudia was ordered by the regime,<br /><br />following its rationalist, aesthetic, academic criteria, it feeds its roots in the reality of provincial, rural, palaeo-industrial Italy.<br /><br />This latter created Sabaudia.<br /><br />Nowadays it is the opposite.The regime is a democratic one. But the de-culturation, the standardization that the fascist regime didn’t achieve,<br /><br />the power of the ‘consumer society’ manages to achieve, destroying specific realities,<br /><br />removing life to the various ways of being human that Italy created in a historically diversified way.<br /><br />This de-culturation is actually destroying Italy.<br /><br />It can be said indeed that the true fascism is that of the ‘consumer society’ that is destroying Italy.<br /><br />And this thing had happened so quickly that maybe we hadn’t even realized.<br /><br />It has been a sort of nightmare in which we saw Italy fell apart and vanish;<br /><br />now, waking up, maybe, from this nightmare and looking around,<br /><br />we realize that there is nothing left to be done.”<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Illustration By Laurent Guidali<br /><br />Www.Etoile.App