The Uglification of Italy is a Moral Failing

The problems of Venice are a paradigm for other historic cities, says a former Getty chief.Venice, he emphasises repeatedly, is a paradigm for other cities around the world in the tensions between its historic nature and modern needs, in the delicate relationship between the built city and the environment, and in the rush to exploit it for short-term gain. He rightly identifies one of the reasons behind the decline as being economic liberalism, which has led to the opening up of the Italian cultural sphere to private enterprise. He sees that it has encouraged a naive selling-out to the profit motive (as with the huge advertisements defiling Venice, I would suggest) but he could, perhaps, have added that this has happened because the reasons for the symbiosis between public and private that exists in the UK and US have not been understood by successive Italian governments …READ MORE