By now, there is no conference that does not praise synergies, understandings between actors, but experiences where stable connections are really activated, between complementary operators spread throughout the territory, networks of fishermen who value oysters and not only pearls, are struggling to take hold.

Playing Bridge, we would be at the stage of declarations. In the past month in at least three important appointments of associations or institutions, qualifying conclusions were signed, where the commitment to collaboration among members and to promote synergies arising from cooperation with other actors in the area shines.

For the most relevant conference, sponsored by ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites,an advisory body of UNESCO) in Florence, on the sidelines of the G7 of Culture, newly appointed President Laureano highlighted the underutilized potential of associations and foundations as the humus of the territory, a diffuse reticular agent, the only one that can make the respect and capacity for heritage enhancement grow in a widespread way. Ending the reports with a call for networking, the audience divided into 14 thematic groups to discuss and deepen the main theses. None of the 200 participants pointed out that that was certainly not the best way to initiate in practice the synergies we all would have liked to work out. By now we have become accustomed, at large conferences, to seeing the breakout session divided into parallel thematic papers: it is the easiest way to give 200 people a voice, given that people now do not attend conferences except to speak. But democratizing the stages has emptied the audiences: the more speakers the less willingness to listen. It goes without saying: if I am invited to one conference a week to report in a specific area, after a couple of months I will recognize all the possible participants in the thematic group, and I will end up boring them with the same remarks, deep as they may be, trying not to listen to theirs, equally repeated. And on the other hand, I will never be able to hear the advances of the neighboring thematic table, which are certainly interesting to me.

On the other hand, subdivision by subject areas is a nefarious but now prevalent organizational criterion, where a reductionist conceptual approach is accepted, describing the world by assuming a single aspect as dominant and neglecting the others. Convenience in description is paid for by distorting reality, which is always complex and cannot be summarized in specific singularities, and especially by losing complementary relationships, those that give power to networks by functionally correlating different aspects. This alteration heavily pollutes not only conventions but also the practices of relational systems. For example, most widespread heritages are presented as thematic ensembles. UNESCO teaches us this when it selects serial heritages: the wine-growing landscapes, the Baroque in the Val di Noto, the Palladian Villas, the Palazzi dei Rolli in Genoa. These are choices that should be verified from a scientific point of view, but in any case they are harmful when they are translated into practice in a rigid way, trivializing the concept of network and the very idea of territory For example, local managers end up highlighting itineraries that unite, as in a puzzle game, the points marked as sites (in Piedmont the vineyards, in Sicily the churches, in Veneto the villas, in Genoa the palaces), losing all the effects of the rural and urban landscapes that contain them. There is no realization that tourists do not go from church to church, but visit the area as a whole, fascinated not by a sequence of Baroque facades (or vineyard slopes), but by the little towns that support them, the context landscape, down to the local food, the courtesy of the innkeeper. We fail to realize that in Italy the outstanding heritage asset is the oyster and not the pearl, it is the territorial matrix, unique in history and with a still vibrant metabolism, and not the product of excellence, which is often reduced to a static symbol, competing with a thousand other masterpieces in the world.

If the fundamental heritage is the generative system of the living qualities of the territory, our attentions as “conservationists” must be directed first and foremost to the relational aspects that make the system functional: more to subjects than to objects, more to networks that integrate different skills and products than to single-issue ones, more to alliances between complementary subjects (such as between local authorities and associations of the III sector) than between homologous subjects. They are poorly equipped relationships, never promoted by institutions, alive in spite of. We must bring to light the networks founded on fertile relationships, those that make living systems, which Piaget calls morphogenetic, of collaborations between active subjects and places.

The territory is already fertilized by spontaneous relationships, functioning on the basis of factors of integration and proximity between local initiatives and visitor attractors. But it all happens without visibility or coordination, with a fragility and weakness due to loneliness and small size, often with actors engaging in interesting projects unbeknownst to their neighbors, or to the local authorities that should be their reference.

What we need is active landscape storytelling, a genre little practiced in Italy, where instead there is now a significant and curious demand to learn about people and activities. What is lacking is the ability to respond to that demand. making History from the Chronicle, which is evidence of the fabric, on which then grow the great works like warp works on a pre-existing and resistant canvas. There is a need for a map to be systematically updated, which is important and necessary to fill in the huge gaps that guidebooks leave, reporting, when it goes well, only the connections between monumental objects and inactive landscapes.

The reasons for these shortcomings and the delay with which we are trying to intervene come from afar. Since environmentalists have taught us the potential of glocal initiatives, where local rootedness is strengthened with long networks, of worldwide comparisons and knowledge, the global component has swelled, leaning on the web revolution. We seem to be able to access the world’s entire knowledge, or at least current activities, in a click. We do not mind the mode by which the click selects topics of interest: keywords. It is a mode that involves an organization of knowledge on a thematic basis, certainly the most efficient and fastest, but with the defects of simplifying complexity that we have seen.

Semioticians teach us that our way of communicating (and probably also of thinking, making sense of what we perceive) is a practice of continuous synthesis between an axis of thematic understanding, in which the stimulus refers back to general concepts or memorized experiences, and an axis of understanding the rules of proximity (between words, between parts of an image) that allow us to understand the whole of that specific message, being attentive to the relationships present in that specific case. Without this part (which they call syntagmatic relations, like the rules of syntax) we understand only fragments, syllables, and we lose the sense of the discourse, of the whole.

Here: we have drugged with the web our attention to global thematic networks and let the competence to understand shrivel with local relations, reversing the dominances alive until 30 years ago, in the rooted peasant and urban civilizations, which precisely on local relations, of direct experience, founded their practical reason.

Here: we need new fishermen who know how to stretch local nets, who rediscover and recount the potential of complexity, not of keywords thrown across the world, but of intriguing proximities, of serendipity hidden in our active landscapes.