“It is our duty to leave our younger generations with a nation in which it is still possible to have faith in the future.” This is the message with which chairman Marco Tronchetti Provera opened the conference Idee Italiane, an observatory of the status of Italian culture which, this year, focused on Italian architecture in search of an identity.

As Vittorio Gregotti said, “Today, quantity in construction is taking precedence over quality. […] Rules no longer apply. […] A population of impatient barbarians looking for modernity are creating architecture that is made solely of objects of design, enlarged and placed on the ground.” This worry of Gregotti’s has, in some way, anticipated the closing remarks of Umberto Eco, when he said, “The Idee Italiane observatory should, along side the task of actually observing, also have the goal of critiquing and promotion.”

Promotion, first and foremost, of the conservation of the pillars of Italian culture – the subjunctive tense, the semi-colon, the constitution, and the study of history are the examples Umberto Eco gave, quoting Massimo Cacciari. Being conservationists today can be revolutionary, because “only through conservation may we march towards the future”. As Antonio Calabrò, the director of the Foundation, reminds us, Eco, the writer and semiologist, became a part of Pirelli history many years ago when he first published his “Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno” in Rivista Pirelli, which was edited by the poet Vittorio Sereni. Rivisti Pirelli has been conserved in its entirety in the Foundation’s historical archive and is also available online. Speakers at the conference also included Sandro Bondi, Italy’s minister of Cultural Heritage, and former Democratic Party leader Walter Veltroni. Related links (in Italian) All’ Auditorium Pirelli Se l’ architettura insegue lo choc Oggi solo i conservatori sono rivoluzionari