Innovation, heresy and landscape

Abstract

When one reflects on the categories incidental to our perception of the value of things –two antagonistic intellectual traditions come to mind. On the one hand the aesthetics of contemplation helps to make the luminous face shine on the “places of delight” or “of marvels represented by Rizzi Zannoni at the end of the Enlightment and by the abbot Antonio Stoppani in his famous work “Il Bel Paese” (1874), which has so affected the affirmation of the value of the landscape on generations of scholars who came onto the scene at the beginning of the century of the European nations. On the other hand the cynicism of reason leads one to emphasize “urban uneasiness” which affects ours lives, attributing to the critical and creative the role of finding adequate answers to face urban uneasiness, in this point in time where history is immersed in the dialectic between local and global.