In a moment of our daily life in which we are assailed by “disposable” communications that burn on the altar of the banality of mass cultural tourism – today perhaps in the name of a hoped-for recovery of economic vitality – we do not realize how easy and profitable it would be to transform places and natural wealth , but above all artisan and manual traditions, partly disappeared, partly forgotten, in reality solid, alive and profitable. This would be the case with the mining tradition of the “stone treasures”, the pumice quarries of Lipari.
Unesco would certainly be attentive and ready to acknowledge – in addition to the natural heritage of the white mountain, already in its lists – and to give meaning and value to the mining tradition, which for centuries has marked the economy of those islands and the history of many Italian and other monumental treasures. Unesco has already done something similar in 2001, in Sweden, in Falun, in the central County of Dalama, registering, among its assets, the disused copper mine, from which, since the 11th century, more than two thirds of the copper that was used by the then known world, in particular English, to forge precious objects, with a copper core and an external silver sheet, which, even today, represent a precious segment of international costume jewelery, known with the name of the English city where they were packaged, Sheffield.
Closed the mine, the Swedish state and county of reference have transformed the old mine into a museum where the history, memory and concreteness of the actualization of production processes, from the methods of extraction to the art of surface transport, to that of the processing of raw stone, before sale, have become an exceptional school of memory, not only of the manual skills of work processes, but also of the dignity of the person and the nobility of work, especially if it is wearisome. A true art: exactly what, together with the uniqueness of the extracted material, the Unesco conditions require to recognize the place, but above all the art of extraction and processing of pumice, as an intangible heritage of humanity.
Falun, a center of less than 40,000 inhabitants in the vast Sweden, today it has become a pole of cultural and tourist attraction: that cultural tourism where culture is the subject and tourism is the complement object. But where both are an indissoluble binomial, in Italy, I would say, an axiom.
The Aeolian Islands are already Unesco material heritage for their geological richness and incomparable natural beauty, the people who have lived there for centuries and their art of pumice extraction are the other wealth, which together, in a Foscolian way, make “the land that recipes them beautiful and holy” and therefore deserve the other side of UNESCO recognition, the intangible one. Not much is needed, political vision, historical memory, cultural awareness are certainly needed: for my twenty years of experience at Unesco it will not be easy, but neither will it be impossible. The first step is up to the Region of Sicily, I am sure that others will follow, Foundations, entrepreneurs, universities, civil society. Perhaps we could also surprise Curzio Malaparte.
June 3, 2021 (change June 3, 2021 | 10:04 am)
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