Can Italy be Saved from Itself?

VANDALISM can be a form of murder. There are 13th century panels in Siena whose painted demons have been scratched to obliteration by pious fingernails; the Mona Lisa has been stoned. Last week, in one of the most vicious examples of vandalism to date, Michelangelo's Vatican Pieta was almost ritually assaulted by a 33-year-old Hungarian-born Australian geologist who cried: "I am Jesus Christ!"

Nobody will ever know what went through the scrambled circuits of Laszlo Toth's brain when he climbed over the guardrail of the chapel of the Pieta in St. Peter's Basilica and started battering with his hammer at the Madonna's resigned stone arm, the folded veil, the nose, the translucent shell of her left eyelid. But one may guess: Toth had lost all power to distinguish between an image and the reality it denotes.

In a sense, his motives no longer matter. The damage is done, and, according to the Vatican's optimistic experts, it can be repaired. No tourist looking at the Pieta in the future--through a prophylactic wall of reinforced glass --will be able to see the traces of restoration. But another supreme product of man's spirit will have become more distant, less intelligible.

Yet Laszlo Toth's act may serve one purpose. For decades, the cultural heritage of Italy (or that part of it embodied in architecture, painting and sculpture, urban planning and landscape design) has been deteriorating--rotting or stolen or bulldozed, concreted over in the name of progress, or just strangled in red tape. Last week's attack on the Pieta may direct the world's attention to the urgency of this problem. It is not a matter of one Michelangelo the less but the gradual death of the most complex and exquisite cultural ecology that Europe or the world has ever seen.

VISIT ITALY NOW, BEFORE THE ITALIANS DESTROY IT said one European travel poster. And Environmentalist Roberto Brambilla--who compiled the catalogue to a heartbreaking exhibit of photographs entitled "Italy--Too Late to Be Saved?", now on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City--put the point no less bitterly: "How can a nation's heritage be saved when her own people fail to recognize it as their own irreplaceable culture?" The overriding threat is not posed by iconoclastic maniacs like Toth but by eminently respectable town mayors, government planners and chairmen of land-development companies, whose greed or laziness is transforming Italy's historic centers into a chaotic urban wilderness, its coastline into holiday camps lapped by a salty chemical soup, and its museums and churches into understaffed, crumbling fermentation chambers where works of art sit and decay.

The statistics are eloquent. Italy contains about 30,000 churches, 60,000 religious edifices, 200 state museums and many more regional and local museums. The number of works of art within them is beyond guessing--most collections remain uncatalogued--but the task of overseeing them falls to the Direzione Generale delle Antichita e Belle Arti, or Fine Arts Administration, an arm of the Ministry of Education that receives a mere 3% of the ministry's budget. The whole artistic heritage of Italy is supervised by 95 archaeologists, 92 art historians, 107 architects and 58 technicians. By comparison, New York's Metropolitan alone has a professional staff of 180.

The shortage of personnel is such that the Italian government cannot even keep the 75 acres of the Roman Forum fully opened. There is a staff of 40 custodians, but with holidays and sick leave it often happens that only four or five guards are left to patrol the whole area at the height of the tourist season. The superintendent of antiquities--who is in charge of the Forum, the Palatine, the Colosseum, and the Baths of Diocletian and Caracalla--has a diminutive annual budget of $350,000.

Five years ago, a parliamentary commission recommended that the staff of the Fine Arts Administration be tripled and its funds increased to $440 million per year, with an additional $2 billion spread over the next decade. This never happened, and the results have been tragic. Italian museum and church security is so poor that from 1968 to the middle of 1971 more than 3,000 works of art vanished. In the first three months of this year, 1,598 pieces were stolen, ranging from candlesticks to paintings by Titian. An estimated $10 million worth of archaeological material, from Etruscan vases to Roman busts, is spirited out of Italy every year.

At times the responsibilities of caring for the cities and their art get lost in a farcical tangle of bureaucratic procedure. A $400 million emergency fund for the restoration of Venice, raised abroad by Minister of Public Works Mario Ferrari Aggradi, lies unused while dozens of local and national agencies squabble over their slices of it. Another example: the frescoes by Cimabue, Giotto, Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. Under the 1929 Concordat between Mussolini and the Holy See, the basilica and convent of Assisi were to be given back to the Vatican. But the Holy See refused to accept them unless the buildings and their irreplaceable frescoes were wholly restored. The Italian government agreed. After 43 years of delay, the final restoration funds have just been blocked by an Italian court. Its reason: Italian law does not allow expenditures for foreign states, and technically the two buildings are part of a foreign state, the Vatican, even though the Vatican has never taken them over. In the midst of this Byzantine absurdity, some of the greatest paintings in history are literally crumbling to dust.

The activities of the Fine Arts Administration can stimulate some Italian critics to unusual fury. Journalist Lamberti Sorrentino calls it "the most anachronistic, insensate, absurd sector of the Italian state apparatus." But the real malaise lies deeper, and it is only visible to those who--following the lead of conservation groups like Italia Nostra and the recently formed Firenze Viva--are ready to see the problem holistically, as a menace to the balance of interlocked, mutually supporting cultural and natural systems. The fresco is to the wall as the wall is to the building, the building to the piazza, the piazza to the town, the town to its natural setting.

The immense economic shifts in modern Italy (now ranked seventh among the world's industrial nations) have produced staggering effects on the look of the country. Italians put their oil refineries on the coast, usually siting them with a grotesque disregard for the environment in now vanishing beauty spots like Portovenere. Some 4,000 miles of the country's shore line is permanently fouled by oil slicks and industrial wastes from 140,000 coastal factories. Inland, the dumping of industrial wastes has become so chronic that Milanese rice, once the staple of every decent risotto, grows poorly if at all on hundreds of thousands of once fertile acres. Cities that were built for walking and carriages are now, like Rome or Taranto, choked with Fiats. Traditional patterns of circulation die as the arcades vanish and piazzas become parking lots. The historic centers crumble or are converted into desolate museums unto themselves, while industrial suburbs like Scandicci, outside Florence, erode the once harmonious transition between the urban and rural landscape.

Since there is virtually no check on speculators, denudations occur that would turn an American slumlord's hair white with envy. An example: one night some trucks drove up to a little 13th century church standing on a valuable plot of land in the middle of Salerno. The drivers attached chains to the frail walls and then pulled away. The building simply collapsed. There was some mild protest from the Bishop of Salerno, but, as Journalist Sorrentino acidly recounted, "the land where now you can see a hideous new building was worth, and fetched, a sum to dry any tears."

Similar techniques are used in the Italian countryside, whose forest space is theoretically protected by archaic laws. Technically, speculators are prevented from building in woods. The solution: forest fires. Nearly 200,000 acres of forest were burned last summer, and Italia Nostra estimates that at least one of every ten fires--especially on valuable land around resorts like Portofino --was set by landowners or prospective buyers. So blatant is the ruin of "protected" space that the Mayor of Pescasseroli, a town in the Abruzzi National Park, issued permits for speculative hotels and villas that involved the felling of 120,000 trees.

The problem of the Italian environment is not easy. And it cannot be simplified into a battle between the Manifest Destiny of industrial progress, on one hand, and a collection of well-meaning Luddites on the other. Nobody among the conservationists wants to stop the clock and turn Italy into a pre-industrial haven, a cultural Disneyland full of shiny Donatellos where everyone who is not a duke or a contadino is either a museum guard or a waiter. But there is no reason why the jobs created by unrestricted "development" could not also be supplied by rational reconstruction and conservation. The issue is planning, and here the Italians, from government functionaries to the piccolo borghese who plasters the Grosseto road with crude ads, are inept when they are not venal.

There are scattered signs of encouragement. The city of Siena became a model for urban planning when it banned motor traffic from its historic center; the members of Firenze Viva and other conservation groups were able to frustrate the Hilton chain's plan to build a giant hotel on the hills overlooking Florence. Crusading Italian journalists have done their best to penetrate the remarkably callous conscience of their public. Reassigning the priorities is difficult, however, since it involves dispensing with the "masterpiece" theory of culture and concentrating on relationships. Just as a head is useless without its body and limbs, so the masterpiece suffers in the absence of the structure from which it came --the minor works of art, the buildings, i the cityscape whose organic unity gives i meaning to cultural products.

All this must be preserved. Italy--as its government monotonously insists at times of crisis like the Florence flood of 1966--"belongs to the world." Perhaps it is time that the world's stewardship became something more than a money-raising metaphor. Italy has no lack of conscientious critics and gifted environmental thinkers; the problem is that they have no power. Unless they get it, the depletion of Italy's cultural resources will continue to be a scandal to every civilized person. For the epitaph to Italy's self-erosion was voiced by O'Brien, the state interrogator in Orwell's 1984, as he tossed a scrap of historical evidence down the incinerator: "I do not remember it."

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