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Florence on the Threshold of the Third Millennium

For long periods between the 13th and 16th centuries, Florence was a capital of international culture and the subsequent downward curve was illuminated by sporadic episodes of great quality. But from the second half of the 19th century, Florence lost its role as the political centre of a state and its position in the economic and financial field became ever more marginal.

The aspiration to retain the cultural supremacy enjoyed in the past inevitably seems anachronistic, although a number of contemporary experiences should not be underestimated, from the season of the Macchiaioli school of painting to the literary culture of the early 20th century and the architecture of the Santa Maria Novella railway station. As is the case in numerous other European cities - Urbino, Venice and even Vienna - Florence today finds itself reflecting on a prestigious tradition rather than proposing new directions.

Awareness and responsible management of its heritage and potential could guarantee the city an extremely important specialised role as a university, research and art tourism centre and a focus for associated activities such as restoration and the promotion of culture. In Italy, only Rome has a greater number of libraries, archives and artistic and literary institutes (including foreign institutes such as, to name but one of the most important, the Kunsthistorisches Institut).

The rich and unique heritage of archives and museum collections is still waiting to be organised in terms of a coordinated and structured system which will also enable relatively unknown and poorly exploited entities such as the Horne Museum, the Stibbert Museum or the Museum of Old Florence to be guaranteed the role they deserve.

In addition, as has been urged for years, it now appears indispensable to give the city adequate collections of modern art. The city’s vocation to host art exhibitions should be supported by astute programming and the creation of new exhibition areas, given that the characteristics of ancient monumental buildings are obviously ill-suited to this function.

The prospects for preserving the architectural heritage of Florence are anything but reassuring. If the current situation is compared with that documented in photographs from the 19th and early 20th centuries, the often irreversible degradation of architectural elements - portals, window reveals, capitals, bas-reliefs, sgraffito work and external decorative elements in general - is dramatically evident. It is true that the materials traditionally used in Florence such as pietra serena and even pietra forte are particularly delicate and perishable and that even in past centuries, restoration was carried out to repair the damage caused by atmospheric agents.

However, it is clear that in recent decades, the deterioration has been accelerating at an extraordinary rate as a result of atmospheric pollution caused by traffic. Florence risks losing even the memory of the essential formal elements of buildings and churches. For many buildings, it is already impossible to reconstruct the configuration of cornices, mouldings and essential decorative elements. The numerous possible examples include Orsanmichele, the Casino Mediceo, Palazzo Pandolfini, Palazzo Zuccari, the Arco dei Lorena, Sant’Agata, San Carlo and the Santissima Annunziata loggias.

It is vitally urgent, on one hand, to reintroduce an awareness of the need for constant maintenance of structures and forms rather than extraordinary restoration and, on the other, to go beyond the theoretical dogma of integral conservative restoration. The concept of restoration which absolutely excludes the re-creation and reconstruction of irrevocably degraded elements (Carta del Restauro, 1972) is right in its premises and positive in its practical implications in the case of buildings whose original form, although “worn-down”, is still largely recognisable and can be reconstructed. But it becomes an absurdity and culpable in cases where the architectural elements have already deteriorated to such an extent that they risk disappearing altogether and thus cannot be identified and reconstructed.

Guidelines and processes should therefore be adopted, able to intelligently and critically identify and evaluate, case by case, a middle way between the extremes represented by the rebuilding of missing parts judged as inadmissibly false and acceptance of the process of dereliction. As the number of disappearing monuments or architectural details is now growing rapidly, faced with a choice between seeing a form disappear and rebuilding it, opting for the first hypothesis obviously means accepting the loss of a large part of the heritage of architectural forms in the space of a few years or at most a few decades, or to condemn ourselves to later processes of reproduction with methods and results considerably more uncertain and without foundation than those which would have been possible while parts of the old structure-form were still preserved.

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