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[Melodie]

Is this the best preservation can do?

Parts of Italy are becoming tourist parks

By Robert Campbell, Globe Correspondent, 7/27/2003

IENZA, Italy -- Is the whole world going to turn into a theme park?

I've just returned from a few days in this town in the beautiful Orcia Valley, just south of Siena and not far from Florence. At first glance, the valley looks like a lovely patchwork quilt of small farms on rolling land, presided over by a mountain, Monte Amiata, Italy's largest extinct volcano. Dark green cypresses stand as vertical accents, seeming to inhabit the land even when there are no people. Among them, you can pick out the pale, ocher-colored stucco villas of the land-owning families. Nothing could look more peaceful or more authentic.

But as I and the group I was with soon learned, the Orcia Valley is not what it seems. It is, in fact, a tourist park, maintained by subsidies from the European Union and from local government. There are almost no farmers left on the farms. Farming is now done centrally by heavy machinery, as it is in American agribiz. But the appearance of small farms is scrupulously maintained for the sake of its beauty and its appeal to tourists. If it were not so maintained, the valley would lose its subsidy.

And those stucco villas? They've been bought up and restored as vacation homes, we were told, by ''billionaires and actors.'' And, indeed, the day I got home I picked up my July issue of Architectural Digest, the magazine version of ''Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,'' and opened it to view a monastery within walking distance of Pienza that had been converted by a retired American CEO and his wife into a lavish and beautiful home.

Similar things, we were told, were happening in the towns. Tourism rules. Siena, with a population of 39,000, plays host to 1 million overnight visitors a year, and to an astonishing 5 million day trippers. Tourists who arrive on excursion buses to this rich and varied city stay, on average, only 2 hours and 45 minutes.

In Pienza, things are similar. The average citizen is now older than 60. The kids tend to leave. Pienza is a World Heritage Site, so designated by UNESCO, and like Siena it is overrun with tourists. ''They bite and run, they spend a few Euros,'' the mayor told us. Tourists contribute nothing for the infrastructure that supports them: toilets, street cleaning, municipal services in general. The town realizes that its history and beauty are now its prime assets. The goal is to make those assets work economically. Nobody wants to sell tickets to the town. But the threat is that if tourism isn't properly managed, Pienza, like the valley, will become a theme park, a stage set on which visitors will see a sort of performance of the life of the past.

Already, genuine culture is getting blurred as local becomes global. Pienza's tourist shops now sell, as local crafts, items that may actually have been made in Turkey or Hong Kong, where labor is cheaper. It's the kind of homogenization of culture that's going on worldwide. In Siena, the head of the tourist agency fought back by visiting the city's retirement homes, collecting traditional recipes from the older women, and putting them on the restaurant menus.

The group I was with calls itself the Seaside Pienza Institute. One of its leaders is Robert Davis, the developer who founded the model town of Seaside in Florida (best known, alas, as the setting for the Jim Carrey movie ''The Truman Show''). Davis is a leader of the movement called New Urbanism, a loosely allied body of people who think the modernist city of towers and strip malls and sprawl isn't such a good idea and that we should look to the past for better models.

Davis thinks -- as do others -- that Pienza is in some ways the most perfect town in the world. The Seaside Pienza Institute convenes there every year -- this was the second year -- to go on visits to wonderful places and to discuss the best ways to create good towns. Pienza is an appropriate site because it is the product of urban renewal. A hometown boy became Pope Pius II in 1458 and invested heavily to build a new cathedral, a palace for himself, a new town hall, and other buildings, all clustered around a new central piazza he named after himself. The Ed Logue or Robert Moses of his day, Pius transformed a sleepy hill village into a masterpiece. Blocks are small and slightly irregular. Streets open out to breathtaking views over the valley. Everything concentrates at the main piazza, where ''the important buildings declare themselves,'' in the words of one of our group, Leon Krier, an architect and adviser to Prince Charles. If there's a lesson in Pienza for our time, it's that there's nothing wrong with decisive, powerful design interventions in a city if they're done right.

Back to the farms of the Orcia Valley. The Italians don't call what happens there theme-parking. They call it agriturismo. You can rent a former farmhouse on an estate that makes wine, for example. You get nice quarters, great views, and maybe even a swimming pool. But you also get to watch the whole process of the making of the wine, or perhaps the making of bread, after which you eat or drink the result. Something important is happening. The process has become the product that draws the visitors. Why do tourists come? Perhaps because they're starved, after long days at the digital screen, for sensory experience and contact with nature.

Subsidies and agritourists seem odd at first. But we have agricultural subsidies in America. In places like Nebraska, crops are grown with irrigation and chemicals that deplete and poison the aquifer, crops that are subsidized by the feds because they're surplus. Are we any more rational?

Government subsidies and rich outsiders are preserving the physical fabric of the beautiful towns and farms of the Orcia. That's hard to knock. But at the same time, you have to hope the whole place won't turn into a nostalgic movie set. One of our group denounced what he called ''the Romance of the Stable State,'' the fantasy that change can ever really be arrested. ''Beautiful places decline gracefully,'' he snorted.

And you have to wonder, looking at the Orcia, what America would be like if the same ethic had been applied here. Take Vermont. Vermont at the peak of farming, in the mid-19th century, was 80 percent cleared land. Today it is 80 percent forest. No doubt Vermont was prettier then than it is now. When farming began to fail -- it was mostly sheep farming, and New Zealand beat us out -- should the government have stepped in to convert the state of Vermont into a subsidized scenic theme park? Should it have remained that for the last 150 years? Doubtful, to say the least.

You learn a lot on trips like this. Here's one fact that blew my mind. The entire famous town of Pienza occupies, within its walls, just 11.5 acres. The whole town. Boston's Public Garden, by way of comparison, is 24 acres. Depending on how you count, there are maybe 30 streets and half a dozen small piazzas in Pienza's 11.5 acres. Except for the odd service vehicle, all the streets are pedestrian. There's an intimacy of scale that makes the place feel perfectly tailored to the human body. You leave Pienza with an amazed sense of how much can happen on a tiny piece of land.

Robert Campbell can be reached at [email protected].

This story ran on page N3 of the Boston Globe on 7/27/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/208/living/Is_this_the_best_preservation_can_do_+.shtml

[KathyinCt]

This is an interesting article, though sad. My sister and I went to Rome a couple of years ago, and I have been dreaming about going back to Italy, but to a small town the next time. Maybe what I envision will only be available at a theme park.
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