Festival of Landscape Cultures, to discover the soul of the territory

San Severo di Foggia is a splendid paradox. It is located in a lateral area compared to the great flows of the so-called Italian culture, but as demonstrated by this third edition of the Festival of landscape cultures knows how to intercept the great issues of our time. Perhaps being an area that many consider “risky”, according to an often superficial narrative regarding the phenomena of crime and degradation, helps us not to get lost in secondary issues, in cloying debates, in silly, drawing room discussions.

The more than ten-year experience known as the “Mosaic of San Severo”, conducted by institutions, technicians, experts and the poet Enrico Fraccacreta, and which takes its name from the agricultural conformation of the plain around the town, due to the protection of land stolen from centuries of breeding of transhumance flocks, he summoned architects, urban planners, administrators, artists and writers to address the theme of landscape in a way that today we would call holistic, or perhaps better choral.

The landscape, beyond too much rhetoric that hovers around it, is the point, the ever-changing outcome of the sometimes even harsh negotiation between human beings (their needs, their needs, their aspirations) and what we call nature. In this year’s edition of the Festival of Landscape Cultures, the Transhumant night will see the execution of Europe is a sound concert of drums and harps with Alessia Salvucci e Vincenzo Zitellopoems chosen by me, and the final speeches by Ambrogio Sparagna e Erasmo Treglia.

Without going into the true soul of Europe, the risk is that every idea about the landscape that derives from European regulations and laws is soulless and purely economistic, perhaps disguised as noble “green” intentions. The three days of meetings, seminars and workshops, tastings and walks on the Tratturo Magno L’Aquila-Foggia will not only give new luster to an important restoration project and highly prized architectural restitution in the center of San Severo – the Palazzo dei Celestini, a jewel enviable by Ferrara or Mantua – but they will be a real happening for those interested in such a “choral” encounter with the theme of landscape and its culture.

And there is no doubt that in this era where it seems that cultures are all of the same value, or all not valid at all, the theme of landscape forces us to choose what in a culture and in a civilization is considered important for the life of people. The city-countryside relationship, the care of the inhabited area, the public responsibility of the public body and private energies, to which values ​​or ideas do they relate? to what idea of ​​coexistence?

“Do you crowd together,” said the great poet Eliot, “only to profit?” What signs of ideal value must a truly human landscape continuously preserve and create? Are the cycle paths that run under large wind turbines enough?

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In San Severo, land of black Madonnas and black migrants, land of hard hearts and extreme kindness, of wonderful people and willing administrators, the best Italian culture meets to think, dialogue, learn like Italy and the Italies may Italy and the Italies be – in times of new transhumances – wonders of creation.

The author is a poet and artistic director of the Festival