Excerpt from "In Italia"

by Mario Botta

The quality that I recognize within our cities comes from the intensity of the relationship the buildings establish with their surroundings in each instance.  Italian cities will never cease to amaze for their infinite spatial variety. Even oversized buildings and contradictory proportions actively raise the quality of relationships.

Carlo Bevilacqua’s lens captured a multiplicity of relationships and fragments of worlds. His photograph album, a tribute to the Italian city, investigates urban views, the old, the use of stone and architectural details. He juxtaposes figures of counterpoint (analogies and similarities) and of contrast, grasping gestures and relationships between elements.
The historic city shows the deep connection between the complexity of urban relationships. The historic city, as a whole, has the extraordinary advantage of having two constants: a center and an edge. In the center – from where the city originates – there is more stratification. The edge, the area part of the countryside, defines the city that people shaped in relationship to the outside world.

Our generation is now experiencing the change of a historic fabric that has been constructed over thousands of years, and is now fraying into urban sprawl. The city no longer has a single center and no longer has an edge that can be seen by those who live there as in opposition to the empty space around it.  This is a major shift. We move through urban mazes without the ancestral awareness of centrality and edge. Change, globalization, technical progress, the culture of the new and the great electronic revolution of virtual communication have changed our age-old habits of establishing a physical relationship with the context.  

We have gone from a self-governing historic city “within the walls” to a city as a structure open to communication, trade and the multi-ethnic world.