In the brief span of three weeks, from 31 July to 20 August, more than thirty thousand people visited and appreciated the Spazio Umbria set up along the cardo of Expo Milano 2015. According to the figures (confirmed by the exhaustion of the twenty-two thousand gadget-postcards printed for the occasion), it was a great success, and one not merely attributable to the sudden surge in the sale of entrance tickets, but attributable also and above all to the choice of representing an Umbria at last open to the contemporary world. But numbers are not everything. In this sense, it cannot and must not escape notice that the installation embodied the outcome of a genuine cultural project, willed and supported by the Umbria Region, which involved scholars, artists, professionals, companies and institutions that live and work in our land: a precious heritage that, from today, becomes a capital available to the entire regional community. For my part, urged from several quarters, I shall try to set out briefly the concept of our project.

The Convivium 2.0 installation, conceived by a team from the Accademia di Belle Arti "Pietro Vannucci" of Perugia and built in a single night in the rotating space of the Italy Pavilion, set out to communicate, and in some way also to reclaim, the leading role historically played by Umbria in the transmission of knowledge. A role that called into play the two most representative Umbrian saints, St Benedict of Norcia and St Francis of Assisi, celebrated in an unusual way as the inspirers of those workshops of wisdom that the medieval scriptoria were, and thus freed from the rhetoric of the most overused stereotypes. The history of the scriptoria is well known, because it sinks its roots into our land, but it is worth recalling that everything begins in the sixth century, when the early-medieval image of the monastery understood as a "spiritual city" was joined by the equally telling one of the monastic settlement understood as an "agricultural laboratory": because it was precisely thanks to self-sufficiency in food, guaranteed by the gardens within the monasteries, that the Benedictine monks, spending their existence in the libraries and in the scriptoria scattered throughout Europe, were able to concentrate on the preservation as well as on the transcription of the Holy Scriptures and of the classical texts. In the thirteenth century, then, the industrious humility of the Benedictine scriptoria flowed into the Franciscan scriptoria, though with a different meaning, since the friar-scribes, rather than to the transmission of the works that had survived the collapse of the ancient world, devoted themselves to the dissemination of the authentic writings of St Francis. But this is not important. What is truly important is that the boundless heritage of knowledge preserved on the shelves of the monastic and conventual libraries did not remain an end in itself, but gave substance to the rebirth of the cities. Just as the cloistered model of the walled garden did not remain an end in itself either, its extension to the urban and territorial scale helping to face the difficulties of food supply, interspersing the built-up spaces of the city with hanging gardens and dividing the great landowners' estates into small holdings entrusted to families of sharecroppers. Which nourished the relationship between cultivation and culture, inspiring the drafting of treatises on agronomy, the compilation of herbaria, the dissemination of lunar calendars and the publication of almanacs. That is, it inspired the promotion of those forms of rural teaching that, over time, led to the establishment of the first Faculties of Agriculture, within which (returning to Umbria) that of the University of Perugia stands out, which in 1936, not without intriguing symbolic implications, was established precisely in the ancient Benedictine abbey of San Pietro.

Starting from this preliminary reflection on Umbrian historical identity and on its interrelations with the Italian one (as well as with the European one), the project of the installation was founded on the invention of "monk": a new font designed by hybridising the rounded character of Carolingian script, used in the Benedictine transcriptions, with the angular character of Gothic script, used in the Franciscan transcriptions. A font that surfaces from the past, but that betrays a frankly contemporary genetic code: so much so that it presents itself as an alphabetical enzyme 2.0, that is, capable of going beyond writing as traditionally understood. The idea (though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a vision) was so appreciated by the artistic direction of Expo Milano 2015 that it granted the Umbria Region the privilege of using the new font in its own institutional signage. Nor could it have been otherwise, since the installation was characterised by the decorative multiplication of the new font, interpreted as a genuine object of design that invaded the exhibition space, virally contaminating the most iconic landscape scenes of Umbria. In this sense, the presence of two 3D printers, used by the students of the School of Design of the Accademia di Belle Arti "Pietro Vannucci" of Perugia, cancelled every spatio-temporal gap, ideally welding the round tops of the tables of smart manufacturing, where over the course of three weeks thousands of miniatures of the single alphabetical characters of monk were produced and distributed, not only with the inclined tops of the tables of the scriptoria, where in the course of the Middle Ages the know-how of the amanuenses gave back parchments written with extraordinary iconographic refinement, but also with the narrow, long tops of the tables of the refectories, where for almost fifteen hundred years food has nourished not only the body, but also the mind, because, while frugal meals are consumed, one listens to the brethren declaiming the sacred texts transcribed by the amanuenses.

This notwithstanding, it is undeniable that the link with the theme of Expo Milano 2015 (Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life) was above all conceptual. Which is, to say the least, fitting, because an Expo is neither a trade fair nor still less a village festival, but is an exhibition aimed at representing the "know-how" of humanity to date on an assigned theme. But, even more, an Expo is an ideological manifesto aimed at handing down to the new generations a viaticum for the years to come. Just as happened in Paris, in 1900, with the installation of the first escalators, and just as happened in Brussels, in 1958, with the first experience of multimedia space. And Umbria, with Expo Milano 2015, has delivered to the world "a font" that looks to the future with confidence without looking to the past with nostalgia. Or rather, narrowing the field of interlocutors and recovering the French linguistic root of the word, it has placed in the hands of the Umbrians of tomorrow "the font" of beauty. It is no coincidence that the most admired section of the Italy Pavilion is precisely the one that, beguiling visitors with a virtuoso artifice of mirror reflections, definitively consecrates beauty to the rank of an indispensable resource.

Project

Accademia di Belle Arti "Pietro Vannucci" of Perugia

Paolo Belardi (coordinator), Moira Bartoloni, Marco Fagioli, Marco Maovaz, Sonia Merli, Giacomo Pagnotta, Paul Robb, Gianluca Sciarra, Matteo Scoccia

Project collaborations

Aba Fablab, Sergey Akramov, Alessandro Boncio, Centro di Ateneo per i Musei Scientifici dell'Università degli Studi di Perugia, Lorenzo De Matteis, Hoflab, Vito Machristi, Salt &Pepper, Scriptorium, Zup design

Administrative management

Domenico Ferrera

Production

Totem srl

Animation

Gianmarco Binaglia, Danilo Rodolfo Caldararo, Andrea Grelli, Ilaria Lo russo, Federica Moriconi, Tiziana Palmisano, Francesco Pedini, Alessandra Perillo, Christian Renna, Salvatore Santarsiero, Vanessa Scarpati, Tommaso Vicarelli

I must confess that the choice of the Umbria region of this type of presentation at the EXPO whose guiding theme is "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life" at first left me perplexed. What has a font got to do (a politician now out of fashion would have said) with food; I would have expected if anything a survey of typical Umbrian products and perhaps of new foods derived from them. A font is disorienting. The article by the director of the Accademia di Belle Arti of Perugia, prof. Paolo Belardi, is therefore more than ever necessary and illuminating in answering my perplexities and perhaps those of some other reader too. The culture that was saved and handed down by the amanuenses of the early Middle Ages is the nourishment that has allowed us to reach the present day and to set ourselves ambitious goals such as feeding the planet, despite the many difficulties that this presents: the growth of the population, climate change, the loss of arable land. One phrase of the article in particular enlightened me, "to look to the future with confidence without looking to the past with nostalgia", which, even if placed in the description of the font, seems paradigmatic for the choices necessary to feed the planet: starting from the competences accumulated over the centuries, to look to the future, to apply new methods, to cross new frontiers and not to stop at re-proposing the past as if it were a mythical golden age.

Paolo Belardi is Professor of Drawing in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Perugia. Since 2013 he has been Director of the Accademia di Belle Arti "Pietro Vannucci" of Perugia.

Francesco Damiani is a Researcher at the National Research Council and head of the Perugia Operating Unit of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioresources.