L’Italia s’è desta

By Benedetta Tagliabue - 1 November 2019

I am not a typical Italian.

When I was 14, I left Italy to study abroad. I only returned to attend university in Venice, a city I then fell in love with. However, I wrote my university dissertation living in New York. From there, I moved to Barcelona, bewitched by an extraordinary man who conditioned my life ever after. Indeed, he still does today, 20 years after his untimely death.

I traveled far and wide with Enric Miralles, the man who took me to Barcelona in 1989: journey after journey after journey, and I continue to travel today, all the time, ever more frequently. When we were together on this earth, Enric and I either traveled together or took turns to go away. Now that he is no longer here, the amount I travel has grown enormously.

Our more globalized world has made moving around easier for us all. Traveling and working far from home is, today, a normal part of life.

It seems so long ago that Enric and I used to argue about this: he would say, “An architect can only work on projects in his own home”, to which I would retort, “I disagree...”, and so it went, back and forth, “yes”, “no”, “yes”, “no”...

This was back in 1989. Enric seemed to have forgotten this argument by 1997, when we won a competition for the City of Utrecht and for the Hamburg School of Music, and then in 1998, when we won the competition to build the Scottish Parliament and the new IUAV university building in Venice.

As we approached the new millennium, working as an architect in other European countries was still considered exotic. In the ’90s in Spain, you could count the number of firms involved in projects beyond national borders on the fingers of one hand. Today, we work all over the world, especially with China.

Why am I saying all this?

Because I wish to convey how complex “feeling Italian” is for me.

I have often felt like some strange being cast out into the world. Every day I speak a clutch of different languages… all of them badly. I have made superhuman efforts to try and understand the many groups of people I come into contact with during my constant shuttlings.

And yet despite all this, Italy has recently and boisterously reappeared in my life, brazenly at times, as if to provoke me: “Tell me”, it says, “Am I really so unimportant to you?”

No, you are not unimportant to me, my dear Italy, I was born and raised here, not to mention that I like you! I like you despite the thousand rip-offs you strew along your path! Despite it all, you are worth it.

In January 2011, a certain Mr. “Carpi” called up to invite me to take part in the Venice Biennale d’Arte, to work on the Italian Pavilion. Mr. “Carpi” turned out to be Vittorio “Sgarbi”, who wanted me to help him with the Pavilion layout.

As you may imagine, my return to Italy on that occasion was something of a shock. In our naiveté, we laid out the 5,000 m² Pavilion with the phrase “L’Unità d’Italia, 150” [Italian Unity, 150] written out across the plan.

It was indeed the 150^th anniversary of Italian Unity, something that, for the majority of Italians, was an opportunity to rediscover their enthusiasm for their young nation, and yet nobody noticed the huge message on which the more than 200 artworks the curator selected were placed, despite my nostalgic dedication to the Italy I had left behind being written underneath them.

In the meantime, another magnificent Italian city, Naples, invited us to take part in a revolutionary work, commissioning us to design a station for its ambitious subway line. A new subway line, going against the accepted wisdom that digging underground in Italy’s historic cities is a fool’s game.

In this case, Italian ingenuity took the problem and turned it into a strength: any archeological finds dug up during the excavations would be integrated into the stations’ décor (after being restored at the subway company’s expense). The idea of embellishing the stations using archeology soon spawned the idea of embellishing them with works of contemporary art: an architect was invited to design each station, to give it its own individual character.

The result is what became known as the “3 As” subway line: Art, Archeology and Architecture.

Some of the stations that are already open show the world how powerful the 3 As can be. One of them even won the accolade of the most beautiful station in the world... and the ones that have opened since have all run that triumph close. Álvaro Siza, Massimiliano Fuksas, Óscar Tusquets, Dominique Perrault and many others including me, all fighting it out for the title of the world’s most beautiful subway station! The real winner of this competition is the new line, which has overturned people’s preconceptions about Naples (was Naples not the city with the impossible traffic? The city of vandalized monuments?) while at the same time teaching the whole world that public spaces where the 3 As are on display, along with fourth A, amore, win subway users’ respect. The Grand Paris subway line (on which we are also working) is secretly following the Naples example, which has taught us that a station is not just a place of transit, it can also be a place of learning and beauty, a source of pleasure for the passengers hurrying through.

Our station is emerging in the heart of Naples’ “Centro Direzionale” business district, a wooden structure that breaks through the schematic coldness of this very un-Neapolitan part of town, restoring the continuity and flow of the many levels this magical, pyroclastic city has to offer.

I like coming to Naples. It is a city that always has something to teach me.

Another Italian city, Ferrara, has extended me the honor of adding a work to its splendid architectural heritage. We won a competition for a new church held by the CEI (Conferenza Episcopale Italiana)in this town, where coincidentally I went on honeymoon in 1993.

The commission has taken a long time, but little by little the project’s proposals and art are taking form. We are now at that magical moment when matter starts to reveal to our senses the strength of the preparatory sketches.

Working with Enzo Cucchi on this project fills me with joy, as does the intelligence of the client and the liturgist. The Church’s relationship with beauty and art is a strong point that has cascaded down the centuries. It is wonderful that in our modern day, the Church continues to consider art to be one of the highest expressions of spirituality on this earth. I am grateful to the Church as an institution for its ability to express this concept though the countless works that have accompanied human history. The church of San Giacomo in Ferrara we are building right now is a step along this same path. And we are reaping the benefits.

Also at the moment, not far from Ferrara - in Rimini - we are drawing up the guidelines for the local seafront, Parco del Mare. It is wonderful to be able to improve a historical location, a place that so many Italians have loved for so long. Our job is to make people love it even more by toning down all the ugliness between the sand dunes and the shrubs beneath the pines. Roman Rimini, Rimini beloved of bathers, Fellini’s Rimini full of women and fast cars... all of this is part of our seafront. It is all a magnificent excuse for me to plunge back into my home territory, to dive back into Italy. Many other Italian projects have graced our worktables of late: Milan, Padua, Salerno, Bologna… but the strongest Italian call has been from Rome.

I do not have the foggiest why I got the call to do the layout for an exhibition entitled Voglia d’Italia [Desire for Italy] at the Vittoriano and Palazzo Venezia.

It was a fabulous exhibition about the lure of Italy on sensitive souls from all over the world, American, German, English and Russian collectors who flock to Rome to bathe in the force of the origin, on their journeys encountering mirages, cons and a host of other things as they entwine their fate with Italian territory. I shared a similar fate, drawing and piecing together the exhibition layout.
I too relived this complex relationship. I did not quite do my laundry in the River Arno, but I did sink below Roman ground, right there where the Forum was built.

The following year, I had a similar, even stronger experience. I was invited to the Vittoriano’s lowest galleries - the Vittoriano is THE monument to Italianness - to draw up guidelines for a museum of Italian identity through the exhibition Lessico Italiano. Volti e storie del nostro Paese. This time, the world of Roman building literally burst into our layout, particularly the enviable construction skills that mean, in Rome, we plausibly live among structures erected more than 2,000 years ago. We drew the lines of a map using a collage of Italian monuments. This time, the layout was based not on the lines of a written text but on the architectural lines Italy has bequeathed us. I particularly love this first fragment of the Italian Museum at the Vittoriano.

Hard as it may be to believe, this project came to me in a dream... the figures of the Vittoriano friezes appeared to me during one of those moments between waking and sleeping. When I woke up, I did not remember anything specific beyond the presence of a vague spirit. But at our architects’ practice, spirits make drawings, plans and elevations.

We are accustomed to turning feelings into reality, to transforming desires into construction drawings… We always work by molding a spirit and making it tangible. And the spirit of Italy continues to provoke me: “My dear Benedetta, are you really a citizen of the world? Or in your heart of hearts when you sketch a project’s lines, are you perhaps just still looking for me?”