Complex relationships unite stones, plants, animals and men, to create the system that is known as the environment. The image of this system is known as the landscape, and it is not a community of natural resources, but on the contrary, a collection of forms, harmonies and streams of thought, rather than streams of humours or energy. The landscape is immaterial. Nature is material. The landscape and nature change with the passing of hours, days, months, years, and decades, but also if you change your point of observation. For this reason, the landscape is a perennial source of forms and sensations. If nature disappears, it cannot return, but the landscape can return in personal or literary memories. The emigrant keeps with him the images of the landscape of his home town for the rest of his life. The interpretation of the landscape is subjective, and as such, it varies depending on the sensitivity, or the mood, of the viewer. Men are the only creatures that are able to interpret the landscape, to understand its beauty, its essence, its power to communicate, and its unitary character. Men have always tried to understand its origins, and still today, philosophers and physicists are divided. Only theologians, who appeal to faith, give a univocal answer. The landscape is always thrilling, even when its appearance is rugged or melancholic.
Abruzzo is the anthology of the Mediterranean landscape. It includes the sea, mountains, fields, woods, pastures, rocks, and running waters, and its spaces are inhabited by bears, chamois, wolves, eagles, and also by men, with their customs and their histories, all transcribed in detail in the landscape. Nowadays, we are attracted above all by the wild natural landscape to be found in the parks and natural reserves. We need to discover, instead, and to understand, the landscape of farmers, shepherds, and country folk. We need to create a new kind of parks for pasture. We will call these protected areas "parks of pastoral civilisation". An act of atonement for the lack of attention on the part of politics and culture. The former is attracted by the myth of development, measured only by the barometer of the gross domestic product, and regulated by the rules of a common market; the latter is seduced by wildness, measured by the index of protected areas and biodiversity, and sometimes by a kind of ecological narcissism.
The park of pastoral civilisation must be protected, but it must also be managed. This is a new approach, a challenge to cure the many evils of post-industrial society. To recover physical energy, there used to be seaside camps and mountain camps, but now we need agro-silvo-pastoral camps, not in order to toil and produce, but to immerse ourselves in the original simplicity that is impressed in the landscape, and also in our chromosomes. The fear of the disappearance of nature exists, and the ecological cause is a just one. However, our lack of interest in rural life and history is ungenerous. There is almost a desire to forget a poor, humble period, which, on the contrary, is thoroughly noble. This is the reason why I will not speak in these pages of famous ecosystems, topes, habitats, or ecotypes, but rather of the humanised landscape, which is able to remind us, to move us, and to make us dream. Extolling the landscape is the right way to present the cultural inventory of the Region’s resources. There are already fine pages in this book on the natural reserves and the national parks. My job is to recall the toil of those who created the basis for the institution of these national reserves.
I would like to mention a personal memory. During the 60's, as a young officer in the National Forestry Corps, I had the job of visiting the Ugni Estate on Maiella, in order to make an evaluation of it, and subsequently purchase it for the State. I arrived at the little town of Guardiagrele, which I did not know. I had to visit the property situated at the top of Majella, which could only be reached after walking for several hours up a difficult track that started from a nearby village. Foreseeing the laziness of the government officials, the owner hired six mules, with their drivers, to carry myself, the Forestry Officer, the lance-corporal and the assistants up to the top. As we went along the track, I began to feel ashamed of being trasnported on the mule led by a thin, toothless old man wearing sandals. I instinctively got off and forced the driver to get on the animal. My travelling companions were surprised, but one by one, they followed my example, grumbling a bit. During the interminable climb, we went alternately on foot and on the mules, without any distinction between us. At a certain point, a beautiful girl dressed in black overtook us, and shyly wished us a good day. My travelling companions were smiling after she had passed by, and I asked, out of curiosity about their secret joke, "What have you got to smile about?" "Lucky him!" said the Forestry Officer, laughing even louder. It transpired that the girl had recently got married, and was hurrying up to join her husband almost at the top of Majella, where he was working in the woods. In the evening, he couldn’'t even come down the mountain to sleep with his young wife. This explanation moved me. The mountain of hard toil was, and is, a place of tender affection. When we got to the top, and I was admiring the pinus mugo, which I thought only decorated the peaks of the Alps, the group divided. On one side, the mules and the drivers; on the other, our privileged group. It was lunch-time. A white table-cloth for us, the grass for the others. We had four chicken, cheese, ricotta, bread, cakes, and bottles of wine. The others only had bread and cheese, and a flask of water for the drivers. Pasture for the mules. Counting the four chickens and the six privileged diners, the Officer said, "There are four chickens, bu there are six of us. Who's going to go without? ". And he looked straight at the owner's assistants.
These are the memories of a simple period. Nowadays, you can arrive at the top of the mountain by car. The Ugni Estate has become a National Natural Reserve. Girls who have just got married no longer have to join their wood cutter husbands, segregated in their work at the top of the mountain. They go on their honeymoons by plane, or else they don't even have a honeymoon, because the habit of getting married is old-fashioned. Abruzzo, too, has changed over the years. But it is possible for everyone to experience the past, walking along the sheep-tracks, meeting a few sheep and their sheep-dogs, looking at the stones, the bushes, and the trees, and pausing in the folds, with their closely knit coverings of ammoniacal flora. What a lot we can still discover from an abandoned cottage, a wall, or a capital with a rusty crucifix on it. This is man's landscape, written in the territory, but also in the hearts of people.
Initially man was under the control of the landscape in Abruzzo, and subsequently he dominated it. Now he wants to respect it, but he doesn 't want others to come and govern it from outside. The landscape, too, is freer to express itself, seeing that the conditions of life have changed. There is more space for woods also in the fields abandoned by agriculture. The sheep-tracks are no longer filled with flocks. They must now be filled by men who walk, look, think, and listen. And these men must come from outside. It is only thanks to human beings living together that the landscape will survive in the forms that are waiting to be rediscovered. The cultural, and also the economic aim for the XXI century in this lovely Region is the transhumance of men, who come here to read the history impressed on the land, the stones, the trees, the houses, the churches, and the castles. Others have written about the places, the mountains, the valleys and the places of art; my thinking includes the whole sum total of resources, as they appear to the eyes of a person walking along a sheep-track, or pausing in front of a country church. The most striking thing is not the wildness, but the natural environment reorganised by men who live in it. There will no longer be any need for juridical barriers; the sensitivity of people called to demonstrate their pride and love for their land will be sufficient. This is the rebirth of Abruzzo, without any divorce from the rural and pastoral civilisation.
It is our duty to show respect for the mountains, the woods, the pastures and the villages. And this is the message that this book must convey to Italy and to the rest of Europe. A message that is an invitation, and not a learned sermon. Losing oneself in order to find oneself is the catharsis of the town-dweller. In order to do this, we need a guide to help us to read, with a humble spirit, the natural landscape which is the first page of the book of man\life. Everyone can find the right page in this book, to change the page of his life. Together, we must do some thinking in order to create rural parks with pilot enterprises to receive visitors, not just for the purposes of agricultural or naturalistic tourism, but to create a space and a period of information and formation.
The episode of the men and the mules that happened to me years ago at Guardiagrele is a tiny detail. However, it occupies a more important place in my memory than elegant meetings in high society in Rome or in other cities of Italy and Europe. It is the strength of simplicity that has a genetic eloquence. Abundance and redundance lead to laziness, and vice; this is one of the laws of history. The agricultural school of life in a rural landscape, on the contrary, is fortifying, and produces hope in man's heart because it is not based on arid economic balance-sheets. Nowadays, agriculture is a way of living, or rather, of surviving. The door of rural life is always open.
There are lots of national, regional, and local parks in Abruzzo: soon there will also be parks of pastoral civilisation, but parks for the soul have always existed, without any redundant laws to set them up; I am referring to cemeteries, which are true spaces of civilisation, of worship, and of popular culture. Nobody remembers the cemeteries in the country, when describing the natural and cultural beauties of a region. There is almost a kind of shyness to deal with the subject of death. Try visiting the cemeteries of Abruzzo, and you will find a life that continues with the intensity of affection of simple, but proud people.
Visit Gran Sasso, Majella, Velino, Sirente, visit the historic centres and the archeological areas, but also visit the sheep-tracks, pause in solitude, sitting on a rock; you will feel the heartbeat of a land that can be discovered without the aid of ecological analysis, or geology, botany, zoology, and art history. Abruzzo is truly a hospitable region, even for the griffon-vultures captured in the Pyrenees and transported to Mount Velino. These rugged mountains are the scene of an experiment at present under way, which consists in re-introducing deer, ravens and griffon-vultures.
One rebellious griffon, marked on its wings, and carrying a transmitter, disappeared for two months. It returned. Everything grows old, stones, plants, animals, and men. Nature wastes away in the process that science calls entropy, which means disorder. The landscape does not grow old because it is form, it is beauty, it is immaterial, and even if it is based on the real territory, it assumes an almost metaphysical, but not a virtual, dimension.
Nature concretely exists, while the landscape does not, but when nature is far away, the landscape is still nearby, both in space and in time. The horizons of the landscape go beyond the mountains where the sun rises and sets. They stretch upwards. The landscape is a divine gift that is greater than the gift of nature. In countries where the landscape is governed more by love than by regulations, men live in harmony.
The landscape exists, and it can be seen, even during the night; the darkness touches it but does not blot it out. The landscape has a light inside it which onh the eyes of the soul succeed in perceiving. Art, music, poetry, and love have as their cradle the natural landscape and the atmosphere surrounding it, decorated with the colours of nature and the sky. The Region of Abruzzo has understood all this, and is preparing to introduce the season of the culture of the landscape, without disowning the culture of the fields and the pastures of past generations.
Natural landscape "farms" will be created; their purpose will be to provide an orientation for those who are looking far the pathway that leads to well-being, in the sense of equilibrium. In our schools and families, we have fanned young people destined to produce, like efficient machines in factories and building yards. By means of these natural landscape "farms", we can review and correct certain arid formulas of modem life. Simplicity is close to happiness, while complexity is far away from it.
A. Alessandrini
Abruzzo National Park
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