Inland areas in the winter of urban glaciation

It does not seem strange and off-topic to address the hot topic of the depopulation of inland areas by looking, for understanding, not only at the municipalities that are turning to dust, but also at that ancient debate, never updated at the time of Fordism, that saw polarised the company town of Valletta's Fiat and the engineer's Ivrea. On the one side was Turin, a water tower of labour power from the south and the highlands, which were falling to the bottom in the exodus of the world of the vanquished (Nuto Revelli), and on the other Ivrea, an average city with a soft Fordism in a network of transport and libraries with the countries of the labour force. We know well how that urban and factory heterotopia ended. The company town won, although it is no consolation that both are not at their best today. Romano Alquati had guessed this with his unconventional sociology that invited tepid research investigating how people worked in Olivetti. This is a topical invitation, even though it is no longer enough just to follow factories and break down the labour diamond to understand the dramatic theme that crosses high and low lands of demographic glaciation in the regional urban chain from dusty municipalities to district cities to metropolitan areas. Before moving on to understand Val Ceno from Parma to Bardi via Varano, I went to reread 'Casa d'altri'. A perturbing tale by the great Reggiano writer Comparoni of the microcosm of Montelice up there in the Apennines, where old Zelinda and the young parish priest weave a mute and unanswerable dialogue between the dogma of living and no longer wanting to survive in disorientation. Existential minimalism by Silvio D'arzo, minuscule lives, other than the Davos of the 'enchanted mountain' of the Covid of the time where one wondered about the meaning of progress. Two great books that provide a reflective backdrop to my journey into the sociological disenchantment of the Val Ceno. I got there by following in the footsteps and Olivettian history of engineer Dallara, founder of the company rooted in Varano with its motor valley prototypes in the company museum of the Academy, with networks as long as Indianapolis woven by a thousand employees, many on design and research. He recounts and it seems like we are back to the dilemma of hard Fordism when he was hired by Fiat with a job for life and returned to the valley and founded, with risk and effort, the legendary enterprise that is now the excellent Dallara. Giampaolo and Angelica Dallara in empathy and symbiosis with the territory, to which they recognise the added value of their success in making a hard-working community, give back and leave the Caterina Dallara Foundation with the aim of caring for and accompanying the territory. Putting at the centre the issue of neopopopulation if, as the demographer Mauro Manfredini reminds us, the Ceno Valley from 1951 to 2025 has lost 66.7% of its population, which if gathered all in the stadium of Parma, which contains 22,352, would only fill it by a third. Not that it is any better down there if Mayor Guerra reminds us that even in the medium-sized city that is the hub of the food and motor valley network, the issue of youth is at the top of the political agenda. It unfolds municipality by municipality going from Varsi to Bardi via Varano with differences in social composition, inhabitants and income. The seismograph of abandonment stops and vibrates towards the estate and makes a levee with the enterprise in Varano. We have to make an embankment, says Andrea Pontremoli, the Olivettian managing director with Dallara. I dedicated a microcosm to him more than twenty years ago when he was an IBM executive and impressed me with his heterotopia, telling me how his small commune in the Apennines could avoid disorientation through the network. His municipality is Bardi where he lived and lives and one daughter is the mayor. With local development pride, he has redesigned and revitalised the historic centre with an Albergo Diffuso. Small traces of hope recounted by Bussone (UNCEM) and Lupatelli who animates the highlands of Bismantova in the Mountain Report. In the 3417 mountain municipalities, the incoming population has exceeded the outgoing population by almost 100,000 units, with data from the pulp territories - in the northern Apennines and the Alps - and the bone in the centre of the earthquake in transition from how it was to how it will be highlighted by Fabio Renzi, and in the south of Rubettino to whom we owe the publication of the Mountain Report. Faint traces to follow and tell without rhetoric. Because I have the feeling that neither the salmon ascent of enterprises, nor the albergo diffuso, nor the communicating network will be enough if the symbolic butterflies of the Caterina Dallara Foundation do not fly, and with their beating they can provoke the earthquake from Varano to Indianapolis questioning our development model.

Bonomi@aaster.it