As Aristotle stated, ‘A great city should not be confounded with a populous one’. No other places in the world are so great by reason of their beauty as the many small- and medium-sized towns and the thousand and more villages of Italy. Travelling between one such place and another it is easy to behold in wonder so much beauty. ‘Beautification’ is the name of the current of beauty that throws light on the aesthetic values of those towns and villages, enhancing their knowledge. ‘Knowledgefication’ is the name we shall give to the current of knowledge that arouses love for beauty. The two currents together promote a harmonious social and aesthetical order that enhances the quality of living. Policy makers and civil society have a responsibility to keep intact the beauty of the Italian cultural heritage and its landscapes, relentlessly pursuing the objective of providing power to these two currents.
Wonderful places to visit certainly attract tourists, but what matters most is the attraction of the right kind of citizens and the best talents from all over the world. Traditional and digital tourism on the one hand and, on the other, brain circulation (mobility in a physical sense that stimulates face-to-face communication) and brain waves (mobility in a virtual sense that takes advantage of new, open-space technologies) are reflective destinations capable of arousing emotion in a game of crossed eyes. It would be a manifest error of appreciation to consider digital tourism and brain waves as an alternative to the decay of beauty caused by feeble-mindedness, indecisiveness and wrong and inefficient decisions. 
When the weeds of decay have rooted and start to grow, those who want to uproot them should think big. When the thinking is not big, what happens? In Bologna, one of the most beautiful cities in Italy, the City Council thinks so small that the weeds of decay have taken root in the porticoes and on the walls of the historic buildings and all the houses of the historic centre, one of the largest in Europe; but the porticoes, some 38 kilometres in all and built throughout a long historic period, are an extraordinary cultural asset that is a candidate for nomination and approval as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Not wishing to marry Mr Common Sense, the City Council of Bologna cleans the various graffiti on the porticoes and walls during the daytime, so that during the night the ‘coarse soldiery’ – similar to that described by Alessandro Manzoni in his historical romance The Betrothed – may have clean surfaces on which to scrawl. If he could marry Ms City Council, Mr Common Sense would find the path to undertake the work of prevention (civic education) and repression (night patrol). Entering into the marriage is, alas, something they must not do. Well then, let the owners of apartment buildings pay for the ‘doing’ of the coarse soldiery that scribbles on the walls and the ‘undoing’ of those who paint over or remove these linguistic eyesores. We may think that an annual subscription for ‘cleanliness guaranteed’, perhaps in the order of €130 to €200 per building is a small amount; indeed, in monetary terms it is very little, although it would still be a hidden tax that would tend to hide the lack of care and the inefficiency of the public authority. It is more if we open windows on the subject of property rights.
These are the property rights that must be the sacrificial lamb on the altar of non-common sense. Everyone can benefit from a graffiti-free view of the porticoes, palaces, monuments and many other public and private artefacts that decorate the city spaces. Beauty is an indivisible good: its consumption by one person does not reduce the amount available for others. It is this indivisibility that the coarse soldiery has thrown away to rot. Beauty is also a non-exclusive good – it is difficult, if not impossible, to exclude anyone from enjoying the aesthetics of the city. The succession of beautiful buildings in the historic centre and the uniqueness of the long stretches of the arcades are both a gift that the people of Bologna have received from their ancestors and a very pleasant surprise for tourists. The coarse soldiery acts as a maverick, free to raise a wall of ugliness that detracts from and even removes the beauty from our vision. In short, that soldiery is a group of individuals highly motivated to take action that results in divisibility and exclusion in the city.
Under these conditions, subscriptions and fines are the outcome of an asymmetry between the apartment building owner who pay and the victorious soldiery, given that the public authorities were obliged to raise the white flag of surrender on the two sides of prevention and repression. The maintenance of beauty is a very long journey. Who undertakes it should be determined and possess the qualities of a marathon runner – including the necessary psychological motivation. This is not the case with the municipal government of Bologna. The City Council is an athlete for sprint races only. During the day the municipality attempts to clean the walls; during the night there is a return to the implacably ugly. There is a pause; then, again, another short race. The local government can attach a price tag for the fight against graffiti, but this cannot be done with beauty, an intangible good whose intrinsic characteristics of uniqueness keep it outside the bounds of economic calculation. Beauty, however, gives value to the reputational capital of the city – the set of values and social behaviours that distinguish those cities that make progress from those on in decline. An anti-graffiti subscription will certainly not increase the reputational capital of Bologna.
A bitter conclusion: because there is no clear sign for a path that leads to beauty, I wonder what Stendhal, restored to life, would say today. Visiting the city, this 19th-century French writer jotted down these words on 28 December 1816, then included them in his book Voyages en Italie which was first published in 1826:
‘En général, les portiques de Bologne sont loin d’être aussi élégants que ceux de la rue Castiglione, mais ils sont Lien plus commodes, et mettent parfaitement à l’abri des plus grande pluies’ [‘On the whole the porticoes of Bologna are far from as elegant as those of the rue Castiglione, but they are much more convenient and provide perfect shelter from the heaviest of rain.’]. Stendhal, Voyages en Italie, 1826 
The story of the beauty of Bologna being in a state of decay shows that the interplay between beautification and knowledgefication is a precondition for finding paths that infuse new vitality into the body of great places. This cannot happen if a community, its policy makers, and individual citizens stay locked – seemingly in relative security – in the silo mentality that obscures the vision of possible futures.
(Article provided by Piero Formica)
