Anghiari si racconta

My mother’s name was Lina, my father’s Arnaldo; I have a sister, Patrizia. I was born in Arezzo, December 1960. It was snowing that day. I was the first in the family to be born in a clinic (my sister was born at home) and I was the first one not to be born in a village, in the countryside. My parents came to Arezzo to work, and for the first three years of my life, we lived in the historic centre, in a house built at the beginning of the 20th century… I have memories of the garden.

Then, during the boom years, we bought a new house in a new suburb with schools. I always walked to school, with my sister and friends – we didn’t need to use public transport. Our suburb bordered on an agricultural area, so I played a lot with friends in the countryside. That was very important for me – this was my sphere of action, the first explorations during childhood. My mother didn’t work, so she had a lot of time for us: I have strong memories of crossing the whole town on foot with her … I lived a vision of wide spaces. It was a foundational experience.

I attended the liceo scientifico in Arezzo, in a building that was an old goldsmith factory – Arezzo is famous for gold manufacturing.I had a strong need to work to redeem my mother’s presumed inferior situation. I wanted to do painting restoration but, at the liceo (high school), I met a teacher who said to me: ‘do engineering’. Mentors can create a conflict … I said ‘no’ and did architecture (at the University of Florence), something in between, still with the idea of dedicating myself to restoration. There was this theme of the past throughout my studies. I transferred this passion for history to the city, to the history of the territory, and, on meeting other teachers, to landscape history. I became interested in how we live in a place, how we make it our own. The city is not just a place that is built – it depends on an innate desire to live together, to be united against what surrounds and intimidates us. Then there is the historic Tuscan landscape – olive groves on terraces – an aspiration towards beauty. In my graduation thesis I researched this collective consciousness, those unwritten rules we all carry inside us.

After I graduated, in 1986, my professor invited me to work with him in Florence. Then, by chance, I saw a call by the Anghiari municipality for applications for a position …. and I was successful. So, everything changed, it was the beginning of an adventure that has lasted for 37 years.

When I started working in Anghiari, I lived in Arezzo, then, in 1990, I moved here, to this very house – I moved in with my partner whom I’d met in the Comune. To start with I didn’t know anyone at work. I was 26, the only woman architect, so I was a bit worried, but the head of the office was a great teacher, very generous – he taught me everything I hadn’t learnt from books… I learnt it on the go. I wanted to put myself at the service of the community and try as much as possible to maintain the traditions of the town.

I achieved my objective of drawing up the town plan – I have always found good administrators who have believed in me. After 10 years, I changed jobs and went back to Arezzo but continued to live here. I worked in the province offices for 17 years, participating in the landscape planning for the whole province. Then I moved to Florence, concluding my career working for the Tuscan Region offices in charge of natural reserves and the protection of biodiversity.

Despite not having been born in Anghiari, this is my place, a choice dictated by something inside me. When I decided to make Anghiari the topic of my thesis it was because I knew people here. I would walk into a restored house in the old centre and see that it had been renovated with such attention and care – it was a simple job, but the care in the choice of materials and the way they had treated the walls followed philological criteria that could have been those of an architect from the Soprintendenza. I was surprised because it was done by someone who didn’t have any technical knowledge – it just came from a competence, a sensibility belonging to everybody. I also noticed that there weren’t any ‘modern’ changes in the historic centre – no anodized aluminium window frames, for example. In part, the maintenance of traditional elements happened because the town was poor – people couldn’t build new houses, so they preserved the old ones.

I interviewed people on how they built, where they found the information, where they found the materials, tools, how they worked to rebuild a world that doesn’t exist anymore… but these ways of repairing and rebuilding are still maintained as an unwritten artisan knowledge. It is so important for the architect or the urbanist to keep all of this in mind, this heritage of knowledge – we must understand the past to design new parts of the city.

Observing all the activities people carried out in the streets drew me towards an anthropological type of research method that focussed on the social context. I was particularly interested in how this community had built the landscape, the town and the houses – how the houses represented their values. And studying the surrounding landscape was useful for understanding the settlement system, how this land was populated, the walled towns with a medieval origin, and the relationship between the village and the countryside.

There has always been a sacred dimension to this relation with the territory. For example, for the anghiaresi, the road from Anghiari to the church of Il Carmine is an umbilical cord … there’s a long tradition of processions along there. For this reason, the antenna they want to build along that road would not only deface the beautiful view but would also interrupt this continuity. Perhaps they don’t realize that it is the most important road in Anghiari, that it represents a way of connecting with the territory.

In various catholic rituals and processions, there is a continuity with pagan rituals designed to protect the land from negative forces. I studied the shrines and crosses often found in places where there could have been an evil entity, or a violent crime had been committed. These signs keep a sacred connection to the land.

I was also interested in the relationship between private and public-collective space. Streets are public, but when women sit to chat, put a table out to play cards, they become semi-private. I looked for functions like public ovens to cook bread, which everybody used, and the water fountain. Then there is the piazza, a meeting place for shows, celebrations, markets… .

Living in places like Anghiari, we have a spatial sense of connection with others and with the world around us, whereas in the city, space is more privatised. Not only is there fresh air, but the sense of an embrace which is good for the soul. Coming here from the city means re-educating the eye, saying this place belongs to me, and, ideally, I belong to it.

LUA connects with my professional story, my interest in the memory of places. When Duccio Demetrio and Saverio Tutino founded LUA, they got me interested in the history of a person – I immediately liked it. In 2001, my mother died, young at 66. I felt the desire to record her memories of me when I was young … I enrolled in a writing course and wrote my autobiography in 2001. Tutino, who lived in Rome, asked me to be the vice-president, and I have been the president for more than 10 years. On the 1st April this year I retired and I am now dedicating more time to this job.

We have begun a new project this year called ‘Un borgo che parla’. It is financed by the Minister of Culture with PNRR funds with the objective of running workshops in which people from Anghiari can recount the places they love, where they play, work, party, how they see the village. It is a way to be together, tell our stories to each other, but also to write and read. We’ll be recording podcasts, and the Anghiari theatre, the Museo della Battaglia and the Diary Archive at Pieve Santo Stefano are also involved. The idea is to make these stories available to visitors via a QR code. There will be loudspeakers linked to the Museo della Battaglia and, in a loop, we could broadcast the stories of other places – tourists will be able to leave their testimonies. It is about creating a dialogue.

I am optimistic about the future of Anghiari. The care that people have taken with the preservation of traditions … there is a great sense of belonging. I hope that outsiders also can recognise the unique values of this place. Keeping the past alive is so important: the stones talk and tell stories, they speak of us, and our village – this is what we are, we are stones. This is Italy.