Vol. 12, no. 1 (2020)

The first issue of the twice-yearly journal “Umbria contemporanea” dates from 2003. Raffaele Rossi is its founder and, until 2008, the year in which ill health forced him to give up the undertaking, he is also its editor and proofreader. The aim of his intellectual challenge is set out in the opening pages of the inaugural issue: “‘Umbria contemporanea’ is conceived as a proposal for study, research and debate on the transformations that have taken place in Umbria over the last fifty years, with the aim of better understanding the present and rediscovering the coordinates that allow us to think about and plan the future”.[1] Rossi does not intend simply to produce a survey of reflections on the past, but to forge an instrument of historical and social inquiry capable of “rereading the contemporary history of Umbria by starting from the questions that the present poses, in order to attain knowledge and consciousness of itself”.[2] Behind these reasons there emerges clearly the interpretation and the function that Rossi assigns to history, which is impelled to cross the boundary of a science of the past and translate itself into a science of change, between continuity and discontinuity, between complexity and contradiction.[3] The Perugian intellectual thus establishes an organic relationship between history and politics; a relationship that, through a systematic critical rethinking of processes, raises that ideal tension which is indispensable to the quality of the governance of change (economic, social, political, anthropological). From this there follows and matures a constant dialectical relationship between culture and politics, capable of increasing the understanding of concrete situations and of the profound transformations that affect the many spheres of civic life. “Umbria contemporanea” therefore arises with the intention of reducing the distance between intellectual elaboration and the political world.

In the twenty-first century, with the overcoming of the heated ideological conflict of the twentieth century, with the crisis of the grand narratives and the fragmentation of identities, political action has in fact lost that cultural force which, between the 1950s and the 1970s, had made it possible to steer collective destinies while nourishing a passionate democratic participation. Rossi’s ambition is therefore to tie back together the threads of two moments – the intellectual and the political, precisely – in order to answer the society of the “sad passions” with the rationality of utopia. The recovery of a public use of history serves Rossi to counterbalance the drifts that tend to trivialize the past, progressively confined to the celebrations of an institutionalized, folklorized memory, all too often bent to mere political legitimations.[4] “Umbria contemporanea”, in this regard, seeks to find a virtuous point of balance between two opposite and extreme visions of history: history as negation and history as myth. If the first weighs above all the perpetual forward movement of time, producing a rootless imbalance toward the future, the second, wholly bent on grasping the ills of the contingent, exhausts itself in a kind of consolatory myth, closing itself off in a nostalgic return to the past.[5] In the same vein as Walter Benjamin, Rossi conceives of history as an open time: the past does not abandon the present and cannot be separated from it. In other words, like the German philosopher, the Perugian scholar holds that in order to reactivate the past it is necessary to sift the contradictions of the present; an operation that becomes possible, however, only by assigning to the historiographical account a public and political dimension.[6]

The core of the journal’s historical and social analysis lies in its central section “Ripensare l’Umbria” (Rethinking Umbria), regarded by Rossi as the privileged vantage point from which to “look back and look ahead”.[7] It is accompanied by other sections that “rethink Umbria” through more specifically territorial or distinctly sectoral perspectives and contributions. Issue after issue, the journal would abandon a fairly generalist approach to regional questions in order to set out themes and problems with growing precision. The issues devoted to the Terni industry, to the centenary of the Cgil, to infrastructure, to the landscape, to multiculturalism and to religiosity in fact come to resemble genuine monographs.[8]

In 2003 and 2004, “Umbria contemporanea” focused in particular on the historical and critical definition of the region’s identity. Rossi’s intellectual challenge begins with a question: at the dawn of the new millennium, what prospects can be outlined for an Umbria caught in the grip of the contradictions of the contemporary age? For an Umbria, on the one hand, assailed by a globalization marked by neo-centralist impulses and, on the other, pressed by demands for political and social innovation? Rossi thus returns to reckon with the Risorgimento period and with the contexts of the formation of the unitary State, advancing an argument aimed at strategically repositioning the identity profiles of the region as they gradually took shape and evolved between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the Umbria delle città, the Umbria verde, the Umbria francescana and the Umbria rossa (the Umbria of the cities, the green, the Franciscan and the red Umbria) then appear, in his view, as tesserae of a single mosaic in which history reflects the identity of a territory and of a people on a journey toward emancipation.[9] From the birth of the Province of Umbria until the aftermath of the Second World War, the peasant masses, framed within the settled mechanics of sharecropping, were excluded from taking part in the processes of economic and social development. In this respect, the 1950s and 1960s saw an imposing turning point, because, as the traditional agricultural Umbria waned, the equally traditional relationship between town and countryside was also extinguished. Sharecropping had been a product of the cities. More precisely, over the centuries a complex relationship of governance – and at times of harsh domination – of the city over the countryside had crystallized, but a relationship of ambivalence had also settled, with the countryside characterizing the cities in their function as agrarian capitals.[10] The season of the urbanization of the peasant masses, which – ça va sans dire – does not come about without social traumas, even though it matures with evident delay compared with other areas of the country, projects Umbria into the modern age, confirming and at the same time structurally reconfiguring the centrality of the city. To be sure, Umbria remains the Umbria delle città, since the common denominator of the regional territory remains the widespread web of urban centres (medium, small, very small).[11] At the same time, however, masters and peasants alike were defeated by the “economic miracle”; the countryside became urbanized and the old agrarian capitals industrialized.[12] The long-standing shortcomings in capitalist development and the urbanism of medieval descent became, within a few decades, the elements of strength on which to rest the region’s peculiar type of modernization. In Rossi’s view, cities of contained size have the advantage of being able to express themselves as “an organized space where men belonging to different classes and social strata, to various trades and professions, come together, with a high degree of creativity, to build a common project”.[13] Conversely, with urban gigantism, clearly detectable in areas of both Northern and Southern Italy, fragmentation and the clash of interests triumph, turning the city-environment into a depersonalized, atomized and disharmonious space.[14] Cities are first of all the places of social cohesion and democratic participation; they are the places in which to try to weld productive vitality to socio-cultural advancement.[15] The Comune, in Central Italy more than elsewhere the heir to the characteristics of the ancient civitas, is bound in Umbria to a glorious past of self-government and solidarity. With the launch of the republican design and with the subsequent overwhelming expansion of the industrial sector, the Comune is called upon to give value to these deep-rooted impulses through the social capital available in the territory, that is, through the exchange of those material and immaterial resources capable of nourishing circuits of widespread democracy and the ganglia of local economic dynamism.[16]

The grave backwardness of post-war Umbria thus turned into the detonator of a new and rapid path of modernization, which took vivid impetus with the choice to experiment with the planning derived from the Organic Development Plan of 1962.[17] Nonetheless, the pregnant conjugation of the social struggles for the extension of democratic autonomy with projects of an economic nature took concrete form only thanks to the advent of the Regional authority in 1970. In this regard Rossi affirms that “the constitution of the Region as a political entity represented the most significant moment of change, succeeding in setting in motion a path of unification and of identity such as had not occurred over the course of the past centuries”.[18] In short, the Region embodies the instrument that allows Umbria to bring its own identity into focus and to imprint on the development model a marked democratic and popular character. It was, in any case, a goal reached with effort and after bitter ideological clashes. And yet it is from the heated and free political and cultural confrontation of the 1960s and 1970s that Umbria, from an “undiscoverable” region, became a “rediscovered” region.[19]

A decisive theme, for Rossi, is how to carry out the regionalism that has been formally sanctioned, since it is not enacted automatically by the introduction of a purely procedural framework of government. At the outset, then, the Perugian intellectual is keen to underline the distinction between regionalism and regionalization. Regionalism “is an idea, a disposition, a mental attitude that builds the sense of belonging to a territory, of the way of giving it substance and of asserting it in relation to other regions and to the State; regionalization is an administrative construction to which the central power resorts in order the better to organize its system of government, in full coherence with a centralist conception”.[20]

The regionalism hypothesized by Rossi lives at the crossroads of theoretical reminiscences ranging from Carlo Cattaneo to Antonio Gramsci by way of Aldo Capitini. Following Cattaneo, Rossi aims at a regionalism that would unlock local energies and initiatives, resting on the multiplicity of the Comuni and on their mutual independence. From Capitini he gathers instead the concept of the local territory understood as a social sphere, as a socio-spatial formation of historical matrix in direct connection with a federalist tension of strong democratic content. From Gramsci he recovers the consideration that, although the unitary State is a necessary advance, the movements and political options that attempt to break it in order to establish a fruitful relationship between administrative order and democratic renewal are always to be encouraged and supported. If the Regions mentioned in the Constitutional Charter of 1948 are the result of an opposition and a contradiction between centralist regionalization and regionalism, between a statist-unitary culture, close to the experiences of the Franco-Napoleonic institutional models, and the autonomist demands, the Regions defined in 1970 must fulfil themselves by acquiring a fully regionalist impetus in their methods and in their declared aims.[21] The Region cannot, therefore, resolve itself into an agent for governing the territorial economy, but must establish itself as a factor of democratic reform of the State; otherwise regional autonomy risks reproducing the classic forms and the familiar distortions of statism. For this not to happen, it is indispensable that regionalism be constantly capable of renewing itself, of evolving, of rethinking itself. Moreover, from its very origin it lays claim to a dynamic nature aimed at removing the accretions of power entrenched in centuries-old immobility. The notion of the region, in fact, belonged at first to the progressive Risorgimento groups and then to the workers’ movement, concerned to combat, with the weapon of the unity of the workers, the dominion of conservatism imposed by the local élites.[22] Regionalism therefore represents, for Rossi, the intrinsic expression of a reforming spirit of a clearly progressive stamp.

Without bringing to light, even in the broadest outline, the general intellectual framework woven over decades of reflection by the Perugian intellectual, it is impossible to understand the reasons that in 2003 brought about the birth of “Umbria contemporanea”; it is impossible to explain the underlying question posed by the journal, namely what future there is for an Umbria caught between the pressures of a globalization with a technocratic streak and the democratic needs of the territories. Little or nothing can be understood of the “Umbria contemporanea” undertaking unless one reaffirms that democracy, participation and the social question are indeed the lines of research and study pursued by Rossi, but that they are also and above all the guiding stars of his long political commitment, precisely of his militancy in the Communist Party and of his activity in local and national institutions.[23]

While the intellectual soul problematizes, the political instinct seeks solutions: this is the actual mode of the dialectical relationship between culture and politics adopted and exercised by the journal’s editor. In order to ensure a constructive and non-intellectualistic outcome to the underlying question that justifies the “Umbria contemporanea” enterprise, Rossi cannot do without recomposing the diverse and plural elements that make up the region’s identity. To this end, he examines a series of commonplaces that have become, over time, well-worn expressions of the region’s overall image.[24] Alongside the Umbria delle città – a concept already touched on in summary – stand the Umbria verde, the Umbria francescana and the Umbria rossa.

The Umbria verde is certainly a stereotype of undoubted fortune and durability. Among its founding fathers it counts the poet Giosuè Carducci, and in 1925 it is found in the title of a book by Carlo Faina. Over the course of the fascist ventennio the Umbria verde is corroborated and exalted by the rhetoric of ruralism. In that period another effective image was also coined, one that still belongs to the region today: “Umbria, the heart of Italy”. Finally, in the 1970s, for the purposes of tourist promotion, the famous slogan took hold: “Italy has a green heart: Umbria”.[25] Although the cities have by now invaded the countryside and the territory appears profoundly altered by the spread of concrete, the Umbria verde, at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, continues to be an important identifying factor both for Umbrians and for non-Umbrians.[26]

Rossi is convinced that “Umbria is all history and landscape, and that the landscape too is history, a creation of human beings, a product of their affairs, their thoughts and their imagination”.[27] The historical and political significance of the themes relating to the environment and the landscape is set out with precision by Simone Neri Serneri in the December 2007 issue of “Umbria contemporanea”. Serneri writes: “Environmental history considers jointly the historical and social dimension of human intervention on nature and the historical dynamics of ecosystem arrangements, aware that society and nature share portions of their respective reproductive processes. Indeed, human societies develop by incorporating fragments of nature within themselves, but they do not sever the ties – physical, biological, ecosystemic – with the remaining complexity of the natural system. From this springs the eminently historical character of the relations between nature and society”.[28] From this, at the same time, the political character of the relations between nature and society is added. The democratic question then re-emerges in full evidence, bearing chiefly on the management, protection and enhancement of the landscape. Beginning in particular from the 1980s and 1990s, the battles promoted by environmentalist and ecologist committees and associations placed local and regional institutions before the necessity not only of conducting proper and positive dialogue with the civil society sensitive to the issue, but of facilitating regular participatory processes conducive to a general and shared assumption of responsibility. On the other hand, in environmental matters, errors are difficult to correct and often weigh on future generations in terms of health, liveability and lost opportunity: sharing responsibility, consequently, is in the interest of every stakeholder in the field.[29]

The “Ripensare l’Umbria” section of the June 2007 issue of “Umbria contemporanea” is devoted entirely to the landscape; to the landscape understood not as a sectoral subject or simplistically referred to a perceptual, formal and aesthetic dimension, but rather grasped in the broader scientific sense of an ensemble of natural and human elements.[30] The category of landscape is therefore extended: alongside landscape of high value, consideration is given to the landscape of everyday life, the landscape that manifests a local public interest, the degraded landscape on which the institutions have an obligation to intervene. The landscape, in short, becomes a common good; and if it becomes a common good, the collectivity cannot be excluded from the decision-making processes that concern it. A crucial node of a widespread and tangible well-being, the landscape is inflected into a “social right”, entering the sphere of meaning of democracy. And so it is, then, that a fragment of Umbria’s identity – the Umbria verde – is led back from history to present-day politics, giving rise to prospects of social and cultural innovation.

Another piece of the Umbrian identity is Franciscanism: the Umbria verde and the Umbria francescana are undoubtedly interrelated, since they recount, with vivid impetus, the fertile connection that, in the region’s history, exists between religiosity and the environment. And yet, once again, in order not to slip into abstraction or superficiality, one must probe the resistant historical thread that binds the Middle Ages to the contemporary age. Rossi in fact finds a kind of correlation between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries on account of the common scope of the exceptional transformation of society, which, in the first case, leaves feudalism behind and, in the second, agricultural Umbria. Today’s cities are the fruit of mercantile capitalism, of the circulation of money, of the medieval university, culture and art, but also of the mechanisms that created a defenceless pre-proletariat and multitudes of the poor.[31] In the dark and wretched humus of an endemic indigence, from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onward, heretical ferments found in Umbria a soil suited to flourishing, ferments that bear witness, with the revolutionary claim of poverty, to the need for a reform of the society of the time.[32] Without any extraordinary theoretical forcing, then, one grasps how the image of the Umbria verde and francescana can easily be connected back to that democratic and Risorgimento tradition of which Luigi Bonazzi had been the first interpreter.[33] Franciscanism, moreover, unlike contemporaneous religious movements, is an urban phenomenon. Francesco di Bernardone comes from the ranks of the mercantile class, the nobility and the professions, yet he does not renounce comfort in order to shut himself away in a convent. Saint Francis is a thirteenth-century intellectual who speaks to great crowds of men afflicted by destitution through a universalistic message of radical social renewal. The “poverello” thus becomes the expression of values and principles that are not dispersed in the long march of history, but are grafted onto popular culture and onto the thought of modern intellectuals. Among these, Aldo Capitini, a son of Umbrian spirituality, who in his philosophical discourse – in a secular manner – never forgets that element of transcendence capable, for example, of making the demand for peace even more vivid, strong and coherent.[34] A kind of peace that it is perhaps worth specifying: not a chimerical, ethereal, incorporeal peace, nor a resplendent, immanent peace, a peace of pacification, but a peace that strives to unite an ideal vision of humanity with the pragmatism of a politics hinged on the many antinomies of reality.

The footprints of Saint Francis can be traced in a great many corners of Umbria. In the imagination of Italians and foreigners alike, Umbria and Saint Francis are fused in a continuum that has over time stimulated broad artistic, literary and cinematic production. Francis, in short, catalyses a narrative world “that invites us to take part in a destiny ever capable of renewing itself and of capturing, over the years, the imagination of people”.[35]

The Umbrian historical experience, in conclusion, “is marked by an instinctive religiosity with the most remote of roots, by a mystical vision of life and of nature, which is found again in the Cantico delle Creature and in the Laudari animated by a rebellious spirit”.[36] The complicated multiverses of the extremely simple, natural and authentic run along the slow transfert that leads from heresy to politics, thus managing to arouse the vague anti-institutional attitude, the instinctive sense of being in opposition of the Umbrian people once it had reached modernity. For Rossi – a left-wing intellectual free of preconceptions and dogmatisms – from this afflatus there follows, almost as a logical implication, the inescapability of the relationship between Catholic thought and the communist subculture. A relationship that in Umbria begins as early as the 1930s, thanks also to the Capitinian input.[37] The anticlerical tradition grown in the shadow of Risorgimento sentiments does not lead the communist political class to avoid considering the relevance of the religiosity with which the region is permeated, nor does it produce prejudices or biases toward the Church. According to the editor of “Umbria contemporanea”, it is not the opposition between a party and a religious confession that is the lever through which society can be improved. On the contrary, he judges indispensable the collaboration among those who, despite their ideal and cultural diversity, oppose a violent and selfish world and work for a freer and more just future.[38]

In 2008 “Umbria contemporanea” devoted a double issue (10-11) to religiosity. In presenting it, Rossi stresses that religion must not be relegated to the private sphere. Were that the case, in his judgement, there would re-emerge the “old dispute between a certain secularism (Gramsci maintained that it had failed the historic task of educating ‘the moral conscience of the people-nation’) and clericalism, which belong instead to a bygone era”.[39] It is therefore the new global horizons internalized within the Italian political and cultural crisis that call for a fruitful confrontation between the secular and religious matrices of the country. Rossi, in a Habermasian manner, holds an active public role of religion and of its institutions to be indispensable. The precarious state of health of democracy indicates the need to strengthen social cohesion, averting those inane ideological conflicts that systematically end up raising walls and barriers within the body of a bewildered citizenry and, therefore, weakening the secular State. The “Ripensare l’Umbria” section proceeds along the ridge that separates transcendent spirituality from its social implications and ventures into the intense political significance of figures such as Saint Francis, Saint Benedict and Saint Rita, in order to specify the contribution of the Catholic movement to the modernization of Umbria. Thus, more than faith, hagiography or religion in the regional territory, it is the real impact of the subjectivities of Catholic culture on Umbrian society that is the subject of the 2008 issue. Various and diverse are the articles that “Umbria contemporanea” hosts on that occasion; once again, it is a matter of recomposing into unity an identity congenitally traversed by centrifugal temptations.

In Rossi, the attention to religiosity, especially of Franciscan descent, intersects with the themes of solidarity, integration and welcome. In this respect, the 2006 issue of “Umbria contemporanea”, whose privileged object is multicultural society, represents a generous intellectual effort. “Ripensare l’Umbria” tackles multiculturalism from various angles, relying on the contribution of expertise drawn from the vast panorama of associations, trade unions and local authorities.[40] At the outset of the 2000s, the problems inherent in immigration, integration and interreligious coexistence had by now become central, in public opinion as in political debate. Rossi, in this regard, feels the need for an Umbrian response coherent with the region’s history and identity. Religion, secularity and democracy are the guiding lines of a many-voiced reflection that aims first of all to offer a space of discussion useful both to the field of the social actors concerned and to the field of political decision-makers. Within the intellectual frame of “Umbria contemporanea”, multiculturalism is eminently a method, a set of tools to be made available to local communities in order to transform the dangers of social exclusion into opportunities for a geometric democratic advancement.

It goes without saying that the very scale of thematic priorities drawn up by the journal reflects the political vision of its editor. The Umbria delle città as a space of participation and relational dynamism, the Umbria francescana as a paradigm of a tension toward change and toward the peaceful harmony of the human community, the Umbria verde as a reference to a collective well-being both material and immaterial: these represent the articulations of a politically committed thought. It is no surprise, therefore, that Rossi emphasizes the weight of the Umbria rossa among the many-sided traits of the region’s historical identity. The Perugian intellectual denies that the fortunes of the Communist Party in Umbria were dictated by the efficiency and effectiveness of an ideological and organizational machine or by the atavistic anticlericalism of a large portion of the population. Umbria is “red” because the Pci was able to build, upon the historical demands for a change in social arrangements, a path of growth and progress.[41] Delving deeper, Umbria became “red” because the social-communist forces succeeded in a twofold aim: they achieved a solid alliance with that agrarian class which, having abandoned sharecropping, was asking for a new role and a new weight in industrial society, and they were able at the same time to reposition, within the contexts of the contemporary age, the characteristics of the civitas, stimulating in the territory, through the exercise of government, a cooperative ferment of medieval tradition entirely freed from its intrinsic corporative implications. Rossi believes, in short, that the Umbria verde and the Umbria rossa follow one another and overlap. In essence he believes that the passage from a relationship of domination of the city over the countryside to a relationship of alliance of the city with the countryside was a natural historical outcome and, at the same time, a slow and far from trivial conquest, absolutely decisive for the outcomes of modern Umbria.[42]

The stereotype of the Umbria rossa dates back to the 1950s. In the local elections of spring 1952 the left gained considerable consensus, instilling in conservative circles a concern that on 6 June, in the right-leaning weekly “Centro Italia”, appeared summed up in a headline: Umbria rossa.[43] Nevertheless, the Pci would establish itself as the region’s leading party only in 1963, in a period in which the relationship between town and countryside was already beginning to undergo a patent change.[44] From the post-war period onward, the Umbrian communist party stood on two legs: on the contribution of the peasant masses who were becoming urbanized and on the support of the working class, in particular the Terni working class. “La Dinamica” is the city in which the Pci’s foothold proved the most deeply rooted from the very phases of the Liberation onward. The “Ripensare l’Umbria” section of the third issue of “Umbria contemporanea” (2004) immerses itself in the Terni questions. Here Rossi wishes to reflect on the light and shade of Terni’s evolution as an industrial site, not forgoing a return to the tensions and social conflicts that troubled the local community at the time of the productive expansion and of the mass layoffs. To evoke the uniqueness of the “city of steel” within the regional context, Rossi insists that the origin of its industrial development responds essentially to the needs of the State, that is, that it is the expression of an economic policy aimed at arming the nation. This original peculiarity, according to the Perugian scholar, constitutes the fundamental historical and anthropological difference between Terni and the rest of agricultural Umbria. If for agricultural Umbria the direct antagonist is identified in landed property, for Terni the antagonist becomes the power of the central State.[45] It is an important difference, since the two social subjectivities that were the protagonists of the beginning of modern Umbria – the sharecroppers or former sharecroppers and the workers – do not have identical interests or identical higher-order points of reference, so that bringing both perspectives into convergence was anything but immediate or a foregone conclusion. The fact remains, in any case, that the workers’ movement, like the peasant masses, in the course of the 1950s and 1960s, found in the Pci and in the Cgil its primary political interlocutors.

The role of the trade union is recalled by “Umbria contemporanea” in 2005, the year of the celebration of the Cgil’s centenary. In the opening pages, Rossi describes the union as one of the leading players in the historical experience that helped shape modern Umbria. The key words one reads while running through the texts of “Ripensare l’Umbria” are “rights”, “unity”, “development”, “democracy”.[46] According to the editor’s idea, Umbria broke the yoke of its own backwardness by virtue of the fact that the workers, from the very beginning of the twentieth century, progressively acquired consciousness of their condition. In the post-war period, peasants and workers took up that legacy in order to achieve, in alliance, a concrete leap toward a better future. In the Umbria of the Comuni and of the bell towers, and therefore of diversities and divisions, the Cgil is an engine of unity that contributes effectively to overcoming the most stubborn localisms and the most rigid corporativisms, as well as to legitimizing the movement of Umbrian workers both in their protests and in their proposals for the assumption of collective responsibility. For Rossi, the action of the Cgil strengthened the social cohesion of the region, enhanced the representation of interests and, in particular, facilitated the composition, within a unitary framework, of jobs, professions and organized subjectivities.[47] In Rossi’s view, in short, without the “red” union, Umbria would certainly have been less “red”.

The Umbria delle città, the Umbria verde, the Umbria francescana and the Umbria rossa are identities that make up the historical and cultural unity of the region. For Umbrian unity to be realized on the political level as well, however, one had to await the birth of the Regional authority, which grants to a population that has become a people the concrete possibility of recognizing itself in a common project.[48] Around the idea of the Region there is created, in effect, a participatory impetus that involves every social and territorial cross-section of Umbria. The 1960s and 1970s are a moment of effervescent collective experience: civil rights, personal services, the right to education, health in the factories, the reform of psychiatry become the main spheres on which general political reflection concentrates and onto which an attempt is made to graft a method of work and of dialectical confrontation aimed at raising the democratic quality of the relations between society and institutions. Regionalism, drawing near to a strategy of the progressive social appropriation of power, translates into a new (and disruptive) element of identity. The one imagined for Umbria is not a regionalism that exhausts itself in institutional engineering, nor in an administrative practice founded on the mere management and enhancement of the territorial economic and productive systems; it is above all a regionalism that tries to accept the challenge – of long course and long breath – of the democratic reform of the State. Nonetheless, in the 1980s a powerful critical reflection was already emerging regarding the twenty years of rapid modernization that the region had experienced. In various sectors of the political and intellectual world, there is a sense that Umbrian development had wagered so much on quantity and too little on quality, flattening itself excessively onto the dogma of “growth equals well-being”[49] For Rossi, such a “defect” has a clear repercussion on the interpretation of how the regional institutions function. If, in fact, the fundamental aim is the increase in the production of wealth, regionalization tends to slide toward a centralist character, which in itself impedes or constrains the arrival at federalism as a necessary and organic reform of the State. A marked centralization of administrative competences and a pronounced verticalization of the decision-making apparatus indulge the pressures of the capitalism of the contemporary age, but, conversely, frustrate the democratic demand bound up with the complexity of the needs of local communities.

At the time of “regionalism without a Region”[50], the exponents of the Umbrian left held that a greater level of participation in the territory and a higher rate of political protagonism on the part of the variegated social subjectivities would generate a widespread creativity capable of structurally guaranteeing equity and quality to the local development model. At the close of the twentieth century, by contrast, regionalism had to reckon with its own delays and its own failures: the slowdown of the expansive cycle, the de-industrialization of the Terni area and the general crisis of the political and party system compelled the Umbrian institutions to reconfigure approaches, methods of intervention and objectives.[51] What future there is for an Umbria caught between a globalization with centralizing inclinations and demands for democracy from below is therefore a question that must be assessed and weighed within this latter analysis. Rossi answers the question by asserting that the region can avoid a risk of marginality through a unitary and dynamic capacity for planning enacted within the contexts of median Italy. “Recent history – argues the editor of ‘Umbria contemporanea’ – demonstrates that the lamented weak internal cohesion, the absence of a unifying capital, the tendency to gravitate outward constitute elements of weakness if Umbria remains closed in on itself, but become points of strength when its problems are posed on a broader scale, for example at the level of a large European area such as that of central Italy, of which Umbria can be, with all its urban realities, a crossroads, a bridge and a dynamic fulcrum”.[52]

Far from neglecting the differences, sharecropping, the importance of the medium-sized cities and the hegemony of the agrarian classes bring Umbria together with the Marche and Tuscany. The analogous historical legacy pertaining to the three regions just mentioned has, for Rossi, the cultural and political power to provide a solution to the crisis of the model caused by globalization. In June 2005, in the “Ripensare l’Umbria” section, the Perugian intellectual outlines the urgency of raising a question of national value aimed at asserting the role of medianity. In short, in Rossi’s opinion, it is necessary to press, in the public and political debate, the question of the Italy of the middle. The country, in fact, seems excessively conditioned by a North that conceives of the State almost solely in a subsidiary function and a South that demands from the State the satisfaction of a broad range of social and economic needs.[53] Umbria, the Marche and Tuscany must therefore put themselves forward as a collective actor intent on defeating the centralizing tendency and the de-institutionalization process under way, through the adoption of innovative democratic formulas and practices strongly anchored to the characteristics of the individual economic and social realities. The political hypothesis of median Italy therefore makes sense only if directed toward the simplification of the life of communities, the narrowing of fragmentation and the promotion of an overall civic growth.

By cooperating with three different points of reference, namely the cities, the neighbouring regions and Europe, Umbria would acquire the instruments to escape the risks of isolation and marginality. Nonetheless, in order to project Umbrian regionalism out of the shoals of a certain staticity, it is for Rossi decisive to replace the conception of the Umbria policentrica (polycentric Umbria) with that of the Umbria plurale (plural Umbria). The Umbria policentrica defines an objective fact, which can be inflected in either a localist or a centralist key. If polycentrism, which over the decades has helped to feed certain centrifugal manifestations, progressively wearing away the connective tissues of the region and gradually weakening the institutional apparatus born in 1970, is an objective reality, the Umbria plurale is instead a project to be brought into being. To build the Umbria plurale means, for the Perugian intellectual, “to bring diversities into unity, so that the region, however small, may assert a unitary role toward the outside”.[54] Whereas the Umbria policentrica is a historical legacy, the Umbria plurale is a political choice that aims to stem the numerous disaggregating flights by which the region has always been traversed, in order to design a unitary structure pivoting on the recognition of local communities in their intimate differences.[55] The Umbria plurale thus becomes the viaticum of a regionalism of a new type, oriented toward increasing the region’s potential within the broader framework of the socio-institutional relations of median Italy. In order for Umbria to carry out its function in the Italy of the middle to the full, for Rossi it is above all essential to tackle the theme of the organization of social life within the available geographical space; an organization that – historically – rests on two indispensable elements: movement and settlement. The June 2006 issue of “Umbria contemporanea” therefore turns on roads, railways and infrastructure in general. According to the journal’s editor, the crucial knot is not to understand whether and how much infrastructure produces development; the point is to investigate the relationship between economy, technology and ecology. In this case too, Rossi does not articulate a reflection of an economistic character. On the contrary, he underlines how, for contiguous territories, adequate material infrastructure is useful especially on the side of social and cultural development.[56]

In conclusion, the revival of regionalism in the twenty-first century does not come about through a normative implementation aimed at giving greater force to policies that resolve themselves within a narrow territorial perimeter. The new regionalism is an open project, which sees in the extension of the networks of relations among local communities and among the various political and social subjectivities of median Italy a prospect of civic growth, even before economic growth. The regionalism of the 2000s, in short, is embodied for Rossi in a dynamic process that, on the institutional level, favourably nourishes the hope of a reform of the State in a federal sense. On the other hand, to the familiar shortcomings of the unitary State there are added, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, unprecedented problems that contribute to profoundly modifying the settled relations between centre and periphery.[57]

With “Umbria contemporanea” Rossi offers regional society a working outline, a track to follow in order to orient oneself, with awareness, in a future dense with pitfalls but also with opportunities. It cannot be concealed that the Umbria “rethought” by Rossi also has its source in a thought of a utopian kind. But which utopia? Certainly not the utopia that denotes a non-place, the impossible to realize or attain. Borrowing the definition given by Ernst Bloch, the utopia that one appreciates in the pages of “Umbria contemporanea” is that of the sphere of the “not yet”, something free and open on which it is worth spending time, energy, human and intellectual resources.[58] It is probably precisely this kind of utopia that still makes the contents of the journal so present and so “contemporary”.

Raffaele Rossi was born in Perugia on 1 February 1923. Having obtained his diploma at the Istituto Magistrale in 1942, he began working as a teacher in rural elementary schools. Later, after graduating in Literature in Rome, he went on to teach in lower secondary schools as well. As early as 1943 he took part in organizing the local antifascist groups, collaborating with various intellectual figures of the time, such as Averardo Montesperelli and, above all, Aldo Capitini. From 1948 he intensified his political commitment within the ranks of the Communist Party: from 1951 to 1956 he was secretary of the Perugia Federation, while from 1956, the year in which he joined the national Central Committee, to 1966 he led the one in Terni. Immediately afterwards he was called to serve as regional secretary. To his political work in the party Rossi added, over time, various institutional offices: from 1952 to 1956 he was a city councillor in Perugia; from 1960 to 1968 he was councillor and then education alderman at the Municipality of Terni; from 1975 to 1980 he was again a city councillor in Perugia; and, again in Perugia, he was deputy mayor from 1980 to 1987. The public figure of Raffaele Rossi cannot, however, be confined to a purely local dimension: from 1968 to 1979 he was in fact elected senator three times. In Parliament he dealt with industry, communications, ecology, education and foreign policy. As a parliamentarian he also became a member of the Council of Europe (Committee on Culture and Education). In Rossi, however, political and institutional activism went hand in hand with intellectual vivacity. Passionate about history and, in particular, about the history of the Risorgimento and urban history, Rossi contributed steadily and in many forms to the development of various cultural institutions. Among these, the Società Dante Alighieri, the Università per Stranieri of Perugia, the Accademia di Belle Arti of Perugia, the Deputazione di storia patria per l’Umbria and the Istituto per la storia dell’Umbria contemporanea, of which he was president for as many as eighteen years. Rossi was also the author of numerous essays and volumes of local history. He would go on studying and writing until 2010, the year of his death. See http://www.antifascismoumbro.it/personaggi/rossi-raffaele (last accessed: 16 April 2020).

Note

[1] R. Rossi, Presentazione, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 1, 2003, p. 5.

[2] R. Rossi, Presentazione, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 2, 2004, p. 5.

[3] R. Rossi, La città. La democrazia, Edimond, Città di Castello 2009, p. 33.

[4] “Umbria contemporanea”, 1, 2013, p. 6.

[5] R. Rossi, Discorso sulla città. Passato e presente a confronto nella regione “ritrovata”, Protagon, Perugia 1984, p. 25.

[6] W. Benjamin, Opere complete, a cura di R. Tiedermann, H. Schweppenhäuser ed E. Gianni, vol. VII: Scritti 1938-1940, Einaudi, Torino 2010, p. 485 e seguenti.

[7] R. Rossi, Presentazione, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 2, 2004, p. 5.

[8] “Umbria contemporanea, 12-13, 2009, p. 6.

[9] R. Rossi, L’unità umbra, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 1, 2003, pp. 9-14.

[10] R. Rossi, La città. La democrazia, cit. p. 79.

[11] R. Rossi, L’unità umbra, in“Umbria contemporanea”, 1, 2003, p. 10.

[12] R. Rossi, La città. La democrazia, cit. p. 82.

[13] R. Rossi, Discorso sulla città. Passato e presente a confronto nella regione “ritrovata”, cit. p. 15.

[14] ivi, p. 18.

[15] R. Covino, Tradizioni civiche ed autonomie locali, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 14-15, 2010, p. 141.

[16] Cfr R. Putnam, La tradizione civica nelle regioni italiane, Mondadori, Milano 1993.

[17] Cfr. E. Mantovani, L’Umbria e la programmazione regionale, in Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi: l’Umbria, a cura di R. Covino e G. Gallo, Einaudi, Torino 1989.

[18] R. Rossi, Discorso sulla città. Passato e presente a confronto nella regione “ritrovata”, cit. p. 40.

[19] Cfr. R. Volpi, Le regioni introvabili. Centralizzazione e regionalizzazione dello Stato pontificio, Il Mulino, Bologna 1983.

[20] R. Rossi, R. Sottani, Le variazioni circoscrizionali in Umbria. Localismo e federalismo, in “Storia dell’Umbria”, XVIII, 1994.

[21] Cfr. R. Rossi, Una piccola regione in una prospettiva federalista, estratto da Uomini, economie e culture. Saggi in memoria di Giampaolo Gallo, E.S.I., Napoli 1997.

[22] Cfr. R. Rossi, Il Pci in una regione rossa. Intervista sui comunisti umbri, a cura di R. Massarelli, Grafica Perugia, Perugia 1975.

[23] M. Tosti, La ricerca storica: una lezione di vita, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 14-15, 2010, p. 102.

[24] R. Rossi, L’unità umbra, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 1, 2003, p. 11.

[25] ibidem.

[26] G. Coco, Il futuro delle regioni tra metamorfosi e identità, in “RES 2016-2017”, Agenzia Umbria Ricerche, Perugia 2016, p. 433.

[27] R. Rossi, La città. La democrazia, cit. p. 83.

[28] S. Neri Serneri, Per una storia ambientale dell’industrializzazione e dell’urbanizzazione, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 9, 2007, p. 7.

[29] A. Alunni, Ambiente e partecipazione: tempo di consuntivi, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 9, 2007, p. 48.

[30] R. Rossi, Il paesaggio tra percezione estetica, territorio e società, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 8, 2007, p. 5.

[31] R. Rossi, L’unità umbra, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 1, 2003, p. 13.

[32] ibidem.

[33] Cfr. F. Bracco, E. Irace, La cultura umbra tra Otto e Novecento, in Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’unità a oggi. L’Umbria, a cura di R. Covino e G. Gallo, Einaudi, Torino 1989.

[34] R. Rossi, Discorso sulla città. Passato e presente a confronto nella regione “ritrovata”, cit. p. 69.

[35] G. Coco, Il futuro delle regioni tra metamorfosi e identità, in “RES 2016-2017”, Agenzia Umbria Ricerche, Perugia 2016, p. 434.

[36] R. Rossi, La città. La democrazia, cit. p. 83.

[37] ivi, p. 160.

[38] ivi, p. 164.

[39] R. Rossi, Presentazione, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 10-11, 2008, p. 9.

[40] G. Coco, Nota introduttiva, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 7, 2006, pp. 8-9.

[41] R. Rossi, Discorso sulla città. Passato e presente a confronto nella regione “ritrovata”, cit. p. 77.

[42] R. Rossi, L’unità umbra, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 1, 2003, pp. 13-14.

[43] ibidem.

[44] Cfr. R. Rossi, Armando Fedeli. Carlo Farini. Dal socialismo umbro al “partito nuovo”, Quaderni Regione dell’Umbria-serie studi storici, Editrice Guerra, Perugia 1979.

[45] R. Rossi, Presentazione, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 3, 2004, p. 5.

[46] R. Rossi, Presentazione, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 5, 2005, pp. 5-6.

[47] ibidem.

[48] R. Rossi, L’unità umbra, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 1, 2003, p. 15.

[49] ivi, p. 16.

[50] Cfr. C. Carnieri, Regionalismo senza Regione. Considerazione sull’Umbria degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta, Protagon, Perugia 1992.

[51] R. Rossi, L’unità umbra, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 1, 2003, p. 16.

[52] R. Rossi, L’unità umbra, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 1, 2003, p. 17.

[53] R. Rossi, Umbria plurale nell’Italia mediana, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 4, 2005, pp. 10-14.

[54] ivi, p. 12.

[55] R. Rossi, Tra equilibrismi e palude, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 6, 2006, p. 152.

[56] R. Rossi, Dall’isolamento all’integrazione: strade, ferrovie, sviluppo, ambiente, in “Umbria contemporanea”, 6, 2006, pp. 5-11.

[57] Cfr. R. Rossi, Una piccola regione in una prospettiva federalista, estratto da Uomini, economie e culture. Saggi in memoria di Giampaolo Gallo, E.S.I., Napoli 1997.

[58] E. Traverso, Malinconia di sinistra, Feltrinelli, Milano 2016, p. 146.

Valerio Marinelli is a researcher at the Isuc (Istituto per la storia dell’Umbria contemporanea) and a scholar of contemporary history at the Department of Letters and Languages, Literatures and Ancient and Modern Civilizations of the University of Perugia.