«Of few and poor and crumbling images this Milanese suburb must have been made. A peculiar suburb, of industrial archaeology of little account between Porta Romana and the Vigentino, from what we could see. And these walls and these gasometers must then have seemed already poor monuments of the past, destined for the countryside rather than for some urban outskirt. […] These outskirts have no mysterious lights and this archaeology seeks no mythological suspensions; […] there are no mysterious lights at a particular window, there is no wreck, or figure, woman, man, horse that becomes part of an eternal Greece, there is no technology understood as the roar of engines, redeeming social misery or the sadness of waking. […] in Sironi's gasometers the rust of the iron seems to drip from the clouds, the city is wrapped in a white-rust sky as if from plague or smog or new and dreadful diseases that corrode the iron, the stone, the plaster. Yet what city was ever more beautiful?»

So wrote Aldo Rossi in 1985 with regard to the painting of Mario Sironi, in the catalogue of a retrospective in Sassari of the master who had died twenty-four years earlier.
My encounter with Sironi's work dates from that time, and that afternoon at Valle Giulia, looking at his paintings, it revealed to me what until then I had only sensed: the melancholy beauty and the profound humanity of the signs of the modern in their descending arc. Apparently ordinary urban scenes little by little showed me other, unsuspected aspects: the rigorous volumes of workshops and factories, the disordered breadth of the Roman outskirts, the solitary grandeur of the Tiburtino freight yard; the passing of time over those places produced so incisive a shift as to arouse an atmosphere of singular and powerful fascination. It was in that period that, returning one summer afternoon from Tivoli towards Rome, I had the perception of distance and, at the same time, of the same trajectory that gathered the modern and the ancient into a singular embrace. The dull August heat pressed on the traffic of the Tiburtina and on the desolate outskirts that had taken the place of the countryside, and amid the traffic and between the apartment blocks and the supermarkets, Hadrian's Villa, gathered in the thicket of pines and cypresses, and the former Pirelli plant, and higher up, on the slopes of via del Colle, the remains of the Pantanella factory, closed in their silence, unhooked from the flow of the contemporary, temporally distant from one another and entered into history with different destinies, shared the same fate of oblivion and testimony together.
In this way, when I was asked to write something about industrial archaeology in Umbria, I gladly accepted the invitation, although I was aware that, by training, experience and profession, I could not in any case treat the subject in scientific terms: what follows, therefore, is only a few reflections, prompted by long acquaintance with the visual culture of the twentieth century and, together, by the affective bond that ties me to certain vistas, to certain places that are by now part of my life.
Attention to the past runs through the whole history of art, at least from a certain moment onward, albeit intermittently and with different aims. Yet it is only from the nineteenth century that a genuine reflection begins on the art and architecture of earlier ages and, at the same time, on the concept of modernity. Then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the avant-gardes arise, tending towards the transformation of the visual language through an overturning of the canons as traditionally understood until then, rejecting every tie and comparison with what had been produced in a past now deemed cumbersome and devoid of interest. This is not the place to delve into themes and motifs that are still of disconcerting relevance: to even a slightly attentive gaze there is revealed, in any case, all the frantic inconsistency of most of the art produced today, which reflects, moreover, the uncertain drift of our times.
An extraordinarily rich and complex century, the twentieth in any case saw the birth of a “sentiment of the modern”, which is something quite different from modernity: the development, in the second postwar period, of industrial archaeology as a field of study is one consequence of it, as is the recent critical re-reading of Novecento, an artistic current for decades ill-treated by a certain historiography and which, instead, together with Metaphysical painting (the latter of course with a character and lexicon of its own), was able to think and interpret modernity with disenchantment and realism, grasping its contradictory and problematic aspects, anticipating themes and perceptions that are our own. The smokestacks and stations of De Chirico and the outskirts of Sironi recount, however differently, discomforts and disquiets of the modern that to this day we feel to be current and indeed magnified: the sense of waiting, of the suspension of the instant and of dense solitude in the paintings of the pictor optimus; the daily toil of a timeless humanity, in whose lives, marked by an ancient resignation, defeats are nonetheless lit by the nostalgia for the transcendent, in the works of the Lombard master… there it is, the sentiment of the modern of our own days is born from there, from those deserted squares, from those suburban avenues travelled by buses at dawn, from the awareness that there is no technological progress or economic well-being that can change the human condition without a cultural and spiritual growth.
When one thinks of Umbria and of the sites of industrial archaeology, the first name that comes to mind is, naturally, Terni and its territory, the region's traditional industrial hub, which has already seen important efforts of recovery and reconversion of disused production areas, such as the electrochemical plant of Papigno which, its activity having ceased for good in 1973 and having been acquired in 1996 by the Municipality of Terni, has become an important sound stage for film and television shoots, or such as the former Officine Bosco in Terni, which now house the Centro Multimediale. This spring, moreover, saw the opening, again in Terni, of CAOS, Centro Arti Opificio Siri, an articulated exhibition and cultural centre born from the reconversion of the former SIRI plant. SIRI (Società Italiana Ricerche Industriali) was founded in 1925, on an area until then occupied by ironworks, the oldest of which dated back to papal times. The company, active in the field of chemistry and mechanics, closed for good in 1985, and the buildings were taken over almost in their entirety by the municipality of Terni at the end of the nineteen-nineties. Today, the buildings recovered and the area requalified, the old production settlement houses museum premises, part of the Pinacoteca Comunale, a theatre, multipurpose spaces, services and infrastructure. In the Terni area, in short, an important process of recovery and cultural valorization of the heritage of industrial building continues.

As regards Perugia the situation is quite different. If, on the one hand, in place of the old Perugina factory there now dominate the buildings of Aldo Rossi which, though set in a problematic urban context (and which give rise, facing the nineteenth-century station, to a singular confrontation between the verses of Carducci and the atmospheres of De Chirico), nonetheless bear witness to the work of a great architect and to the city administration's desire to leave culturally significant marks, on the other hand casual demolitions have been permitted of buildings and factories that had by now become part of the history and tradition of the city, to make room for shopping centres and residences.
In the territory of the province, by contrast, the matter changes. The approach to the pre-existing built fabric and to the disused industrial areas is perhaps more careful, and design paths are sought that integrate the ancient and the modern or, better, the modern and the contemporary. The requalification project for the industrial zone of Santa Maria degli Angeli is an example of such a methodology, and to learn more we requested and obtained a meeting with the mayor of Assisi, Claudio Ricci, an engineer, who showed a readiness and a courtesy hard to find these days. From the conversation there emerged the mayor's “humanistic” model of local government; thanks to an optimal administrative and financial management, he has been able to launch and carry out numerous and considerable works of restructuring and requalification in Assisi and in the smaller centres of the vast municipal territory, and at the same time to further promote and develop the cultural and spiritual vocation of the city with initiatives of an international character. Within this programme of enhancement of the territory falls the requalification project for the industrial zone of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which provides for the arrangement of the former Montedison area and of the former Fornace Briziarelli: a surface of about 12 hectares intended to house socio-cultural, commercial and residential spaces, ample green areas and infrastructure, in an integration between restored industrial buildings and new constructions. Architects and artists of European standing, flanked by local technicians, will be called upon to intervene with the aim of transforming the area into a park of contemporary architecture. A subsequent meeting with the architect Paolo Luccioni, in charge of the project – an equally courteous and sensitive person – was decisive in exploring some of the problems bound up with the recovery and reuse of industrial buildings. A first point that the architect was keen to make concerns the difficulty of resorting, in these cases, to a “philological” restoration, taken for granted instead in works relating to ancient monuments; account must be taken, indeed, of the understandably different needs of a client that is, case by case, public, private or mixed.
Another relevant aspect consists, in this kind of intervention, in the necessarily functional reuse of industrial buildings which, while remaining important signs of historical memory, are nonetheless destined to enter into dialogue with what has already been built around them or is yet to be built. An example in this sense is another important project by Luccioni, which provides for the requalification of the area of the Fornaci Hoffmann in Foligno, with the recovery of the former kiln and of other elements characterizing the original industrial settlement, and together the realization of residential building and infrastructure, in a harmonious and rational integration.
I neither wish nor am able here to delve into or assess technical matters; as I wrote above, I lack the tools for it and gladly leave that task to the experts. It seems to me, in any case, that such design orientations have, among other merits, that of safeguarding historical testimonies perhaps “minor” yet no less significant for that, and that, above all, they allow us to remember today the labour, often humble and toilsome, of generations who in those factories, in those plants, saw the possibility of improving their own living conditions.