Between the 17^th and 18^th Century, as it is well known, traveling several months around Europe (and reserving Italy as the crucial destination of the trip) became quite common among the young bourgeoisie and aristocrats of the old continent. Some truly willing to learn from the past, others mainly interested in living an exotic experience, the future members of the ruling class used to spend the final part of their formation years in the cities where the works of the great masters – painters, sculptors and architects – were held. In 1670, Richard Lassel named this new custom “Grand Tour”, from which the actual word “tourism” is obviously derived.

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It is so that a mixture of wealth and nostalgia propelled a new artistic market throughout Italy, as landscape paintings and urban vedute, which idealized the most famous rural and urban settings of the Grand Tour, rapidly became the must-have souvenirs for the rich traveling class. As a consequence, many talented artists moved to Italy to take advantage of the new boom, finding it convenient to specialize in the representation of – what we now recognize as – typical Italian landscapes.

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How else could one explain the fact that every new house built in Sauze di Cesana – a small town situated on the north-western alpine border of Italy – has to be shaped according to an extremely detailed catalog of prescriptions and parameters, all meant to reinforce the vernacular look of the place, no matter how such look is achieved? Sauze di Cesana’s Piano Regolatore Generale tells you how every part of a house should look like, so that a specific imaginary remains forever unchanged. From the definition of floorplan, section and facade, to the aspect of doors, windows, stairs, balconies and roof, the strict control of the Elements of Architecture becomes the way in which a reassuring, “typical” landscape is systematically recreated – although only apparently, as behind these vernacular surfaces carved in stone and wood, dom-ino structures in reinforced concrete are conveniently erected, in order to save money and respond to (other) building regulations. In Sauze di Cesana, architecture is brought down to the level of Le Roy Merlin bricolage: just choose your favorite details from the online catalog, and put them together to make your dream chalet come true.

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I wonder if “pleasure” is the right word to describe what Bernard Tschumi felt last May when he was told that, after several months working on his – quite disappointing – design for the cultural center A.N.I.M.A. (to be realized in a rural area of the Adriatic town of Grottammare), and exactly one day before its construction could actually begin, the Superintendency of Ascoli Piceno blocked the entire project. Why? Because “due to its height and volume, it doesn’t seem to be well integrated in its context, as it conceales the view of the trees (olives and hedges included) that are found at the far end of the valley”. Also, Tschumi’s project was too close to “two characteristic and interesting rural farmhouses, typical of the region’s minor architecture”, and therefore did not permit their undisturbed visual appreciation. As a consequence, the Superintendency asked to lower the building, so that the existing rural landscape could be maintained as untouched as possible – in other words: the best architecture is no architecture at all.

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Albeit restrictions on program (a farm), materials (brick) and volume (that of a typical farmhouse), MVRDV has managed to build a commercial glasshouse in the central square of the Dutch town of Schijndel. How? By printing on the transparent envelope of the building a collage of brick facades of typical Dutch farmhouses, therefore delivering to the citizens the image, not the architecture, they expected – which worked out well.

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Isn’t precisely this nostalgic, pre-industrial look, what the global market of tourism still expects from Italian cities and countryside? So, why should ministers, superintendents or clients be interested in transforming our territory, if such expectations are worth a fortune? The preservation of national landscape is one more effect of the commodification of national identity: under the pressure of globalization, local authorities need myths to hang on to, in order to attract their share of investments, while myths need words and images to become real, and therefore to seduce us. The grotesque laughter of Francesco Piscicelli during the L’Aquila hearthquake in 2009, in view of the money that the reconstruction phase would have brought to his pockets, is an extreme example of the ambiguous relations that cultural constructs such as “landscape” are capable of generating: as far as they are are worth some good money, let’s keep these reassuring images exactly as they are. But as soon as the occasion is given, let the construction begin.