Appropriate Decorum

Guido Piovene describes the Venetian countryside as a “soft mantle”, a warm, misty cloak embracing the age-old pace of peasant life. In Piovene’s time, this mantle was dotted with cities, like Vicenza, his hometown, where people were not that different from those who inhabited the rural areas. This was the land where Palladio developed his unique rural classicism, noble yet gentle, unassuming buildings that slipped effortlessly into the soft mantle of the surrounding countryside. Indeed, Palladio understood that there was a magical line connecting classic architecture and the countryside: a mysterious analogical line that would be understood and taken up by the English-speaking world.

Piovene would be amazed at how the Veneto region has changed since his time. That soft, misty mantle of the countryside has been overlaid with a quilted mantle made up of an almost infinite series of small-to-medium size industries, giving rise to what has been defined as “urbanized countryside” or the “diffuse city”. This does not mean that the countryside has disappeared. It has simply been contaminated by other types of production, giving rise to a way of life where the land and non-agricultural production are deeply linked.

The industrial northeast that we know today first took shape in the 1980s and developed rapidly. What has changed since then has been the quality of that production. The succession of crises we lived through led to the large-scale weeding out of businesses. Of the many that were once operational, only the fittest have survived. This was because they opted for quality: not quality just in terms of sophisticated specialist products but rather the overall, diffuse quality of their production. In fact, some of the items coming out of the many plants in Italy’s northeast seem to have gone beyond their anonymous origins and attained a new ennobled status. This is true not only of consumer goods, but...

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