eDition

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Sabaudia

Translated from Italian 🇮🇹

“Here we are in front of the structure, the shape, the profile of another city.

Immersed in a sort of a lagoon grey light, although surrounded by the stunning Mediterranean vegetation. It is Sabaudia.

How we laughed us intellectuals upon the architecture of the regime; upon cities like Sabaudia.

Yet now watching this city we feel an unexpected feeling. Its architecture is not unreal, it is not laughable.

The passing of time made this Littorio architecture to acquire a metaphysical and realistic nature: metaphysical in a European sense of the word;

realistic because observing it from a distance we could say that the city is made on a human scale, as we rhetorically say.

Inside we have normal families, normal people; complete, entire human beings, full in their humbleness.

How do we explain this miraculous thing? A ridiculous, fascist city that probably seems enchanting.

We must examine this: Sabaudia was ordered by the regime but it has not got fascist features apart from the exterior ones.

I think this: in conclusion, the fascist regime had just been a group of criminals in charge.

This group didn’t manage to scratch the reality of Italy. So that, although Sabaudia was ordered by the regime,

following its rationalist, aesthetic, academic criteria, it feeds its roots in the reality of provincial, rural, palaeo-industrial Italy.

This latter created Sabaudia.

Nowadays it is the opposite.The regime is a democratic one. But the de-culturation, the standardization that the fascist regime didn’t achieve,

the power of the ‘consumer society’ manages to achieve, destroying specific realities,

removing life to the various ways of being human that Italy created in a historically diversified way.

This de-culturation is actually destroying Italy.

It can be said indeed that the true fascism is that of the ‘consumer society’ that is destroying Italy.

And this thing had happened so quickly that maybe we hadn’t even realized.

It has been a sort of nightmare in which we saw Italy fell apart and vanish;

now, waking up, maybe, from this nightmare and looking around,

we realize that there is nothing left to be done.”

Illustration By Laurent Guidali

Www.Etoile.App