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The activities of the Fine Arts Administration can stimulate some Italian critics to unusual fury. Journalist Lamberti Sorrentino calls it "the most anachronistic, insensate, absurd sector of the Italian state apparatus." But the real malaise lies deeper, and it is only visible to those who—following the lead of conservation groups like Italia Nostra and the recently formed Firenze Viva—are ready to see the problem holistically, as a menace to the balance of interlocked, mutually supporting cultural and natural systems. The fresco is to the wall as the wall is to the building, the building to the piazza, the piazza to the town, the town to its natural setting.
The immense economic shifts in modern Italy (now ranked seventh among the world's industrial nations) have produced staggering effects on the look of the country. Italians put their oil refineries on the coast, usually siting them with a grotesque disregard for the environment in now vanishing beauty spots like Portovenere. Some 4,000 miles of the country's shore line is permanently fouled by oil slicks and industrial wastes from 140,000 coastal factories. Inland, the dumping of industrial wastes has become so chronic that Milanese rice, once the staple of every decent risotto, grows poorly if at all on hundreds of thousands of once fertile acres. Cities that were built for walking and carriages are now, like Rome or Taranto, choked with Fiats. Traditional patterns of circulation die as the arcades vanish and piazzas become parking lots. The historic centers crumble or are converted into desolate museums unto themselves, while industrial suburbs like Scandicci, outside Florence, erode the once harmonious transition between the urban and rural landscape.
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Since there is virtually no check on speculators, denudations occur that would turn an American slumlord's hair white with envy. An example: one night some trucks drove up to a little 13th century church standing on a valuable plot of land in the middle of Salerno. The drivers attached chains to the frail walls and then pulled away. The building simply collapsed. There was some mild protest from the Bishop of Salerno, but, as Journalist Sorrentino acidly recounted, "the land where now you can see a hideous new building was worth, and fetched, a sum to dry any tears."
Similar techniques are used in the Italian countryside, whose forest space is theoretically protected by archaic laws. Technically, speculators are prevented from building in woods. The solution: forest fires. Nearly 200,000 acres of forest were burned last summer, and Italia Nostra estimates that at least one of every ten fires—especially on valuable land around resorts like Portofino —was set by landowners or prospective buyers. So blatant is the ruin of "protected" space that the Mayor of Pescasseroli, a town in the Abruzzi National Park, issued permits for speculative hotels and villas that involved the felling of 120,000 trees.