Land of Marche, Mother Land

L'articolo è pubblicato sulla Rivista internazionale in italiano, inglese e cinese (www.mterritorio.univpm.it), riconosciuta come Isi like dalla comunità scientifica UrbIng. Land of Marche, Mother Land, Journal of Urban Planning, socio-economic and cultural testimony, n. 1, University Press, 2010, ISSN 2038-0690, co-curatore e coordinatore redazione: BEDINI M.A. Marche is an eternally fertile ear of corn sprouting from the ice, a battle of long-smouldering fires, a handful of wild ungathered flowers, an endlessly trampled sea wave. All the Mediaeval era of Italy, the dry and rustic Romanesque style of the churches in the innocent purity and whiteness of stone, the minute and gentle humanism of the snug squares, the wuthering heights of the ever-suffering Baroque bell towers, the sinuous nineteenth century closed off by shear mountains, custodians of a ruthless silence of stuttered and disjointed harmonies, the dry and cutting twentieth century with its chaotic and light-headed seasons, the new millennium with the myths and spectres of civilisation and savagery. There is an unusual and ferocious force in the dusty roots of the Marche, in the land of stones and in the land of sea, in gardens of oak and olive trees and in gardens of waves and foam, in meadows of fragile plants and in meadows of water. Marche is a gesture of profound loyalty to the land, a gesture of belonging to its harsh and tormenting matrix. To love Marche one must embrace the sense of loss, fog and abyss, the desolated solitude and laboured splendour, its suffered surrender, bitterness and failure. To descend into this land one must sink into the suffering heart of a protracted cloistered life, in the frenzy of a luminous cell, in the secrecy of guarded and dreaded clandestinity: one must love the golden dustiness of the air and quench one’s thirst from obscurity, trace the powerful song smothering it in familiar silence. Its Franciscan spirit is as limpid as the profile of those rounded Renaissance hillsides, like the expanse of “Raffaello-painted skies”, where hermitages and monasteries, retreats and country abbeys nestle, anonymous and incomparable, uncaring and secluded, the dwellings of primitive saints, hermits and preachers, loyal to the bare deprivation of Francesco, Domenic and Agustin, workers of miracles and visions, adored in their terrestrial journey and cancelled forever from collective oblivion. It is for all this that the Marche appears to be heroic and sublime, idyllic and restless, mystic and disturbing, seraphic and sparkling, weak and terrible. The myth of this region has something that is tenderly brutal, perched as it is on the very substance of existence, where people and things, serenely scattered, suffer the suture of the limen, a wound that tears them from the proportion of the landscape, turning them into boundary and island, distancing and separating them from the body of Italy, a spiritual and terrestrial border where one walks to somewhere else, a forgotten brink towards the infinite universe. And yet, in those furrows of rural tilled lands, in the land battered by the winds, in the scrap of sea “ploughed by fish” flows a tame and wild nature, as compelling as primordial instincts, like the ethereal and untouchable Gods. Marche is a place of peace and secret struggle, inspiration and tumult. A Land of vigorous passions.That unjustified regret torments even Giacomo, away from the prison of Recanati and the “painted paternal cage”, far from the injurious nocturnal chants of the town rabble. “The melancholy that so often seizes me here as in Recanati, has now for me a darker nature than before, and seldom is there a certain interior gaiety, as often used to happen there.” La Diaspora reverberates on each and every landscape visited, the features of the land of origin. “I long more with every passing day to see you my loved ones, and on certain solitary walks I take amongst this beautiful countryside, I look for nothing other than remembrances of Recanati.”