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FOR THE SALVATION OF THE CITIES ALL OVER THE WORLD

Excerpts from Prof. Giorgio La Pira’s speech at the World Wide Conference of Mayors
Florence
October 2nd 1955:

Towns have got a life of their own: their own mysterious and deep way: their own countenance: so to speak, they have got a soul and a destiny of their own. They are not random heaps of stones: they are mysterious houses of men and much more than this, somehow they are mysterious houses of God: Gloria Domini in te videbitur. It so happens that the final harbour of human historical navigation shows, on the shore of Eternity, the square structures and the precious walls of a blessed city: the city of God!
Our lack of attention to these basic values, which give invisible but true weight and destiny to human things, has caused us to lose the perception of the mystery of towns. Yet, this mystery exists, and today, in such a decisive point of human history, it reveals itself by signs, which seem to be more and more prominent in calling upon everyone's responsibilities. So: this era of towns we have entered coincides, because of a mysterious historic paradox, with an era when the simultaneous destruction of the essential towns could take just a few seconds!
By this time, it is not a dream any more: it is something possible: within a few hours the human civilization could be completely deprived of Florence and all world capital cities.

Everybody is wondering:- what would become of the world without these essential centres, these irreplaceable fountains, these beacons bearing light and civilization? That is the main problem in our days, which is provided with an exact juridical formulation, that is the following: Do the governments have the right to destroy towns, and kill these “living units” - real microcosms where the essential values of the Past are gathered, and real centres of irradiation of values for the Future – by which the very tissue of human society and civilization has to be built? In our opinion, the answer is negative. Present generations do not have the right to destroy the heritage they received from past generations, so that it could be handed down to future ones! Cities' right to exist is held by us belonging to the present generation, but even more by those who will follow. A right whose historical, social, political, and religious value is the greater the more the mysterious and deep meaning of towns emerges again in human meditation.

Each town lies upon its peak, it is a lighthouse destined to lighten the path of history. Each town, and each civilization is organically linked, thank to a close relation and a close exchange, to any other town and civilization: all together, they form a single grand organism. All for one and one for all. History and civilization transcribe and fix themselves, as it were, almost petrifying themselves onto walls, temples, buildings, houses, workshops, schools, hospitals, which make up the city. Towns, and particularly the essential towns, retreat into eternal values, bearing with them, along the whole course of centuries and generations, the historic events, which have seen them being players and witnesses at the same time. They are like living books of human history and civilization: destined to guide the spiritual and material education of coming generations. They are like endless reserve of those essential human goods – both the highest cultural and religious ones, and the basic technical and economic ones - absolutely required by each generation.
Towns are the adequate instruments to get over any kind of crisis, human history and civilization might be subjected to.

Our times' crisis, that is a crisis of disproportion and intemperance in comparison with what is actually human, provides us with the evidence of the therapeutic and decisive value of towns. As it has already been said, in fact, the current crisis can be defined as the eradication of the person from the organic context of the city. Well: such a crisis can only be solved deeply and organically by settling again the persons in the cities where they were born, and whose history and tradition they belong to. And, before I finish my speech about the value of towns for the destiny of the whole civilization, please let me take an overall look at the millenary cities, which, like precious stones, beautify the lands of Europe and Asia. Gentlemen, we would need the inspired speech of the prophets to describe them: Tobiah, Isaiah, Jeremy, Ezekiel, St. John. Péguy’s brilliant definition can be applied to everyone of them: being the city of man, and the sketch and prefiguration of the city of God.

Cities standing all around the Temple, irradiated by the Celestial Light springing from it: cities where beauty delays, transcribing itself onto the stones: cities placed upon the mountain of centuries and generations; destined forever to bear a deeper and essential integration of quality and value to present and future mechanical civilization! Each town is not a museum where even precious relics of the Past are gathered; it is a light and a beauty destined to lighten the essential structures of future history and civilization. Towns cannot be sentenced to death, since their death would let the whole civilization die.

… and in towns, there are the children, the future of human kind (UNICEF CAMPANIA)

Naples, March 23rd 2003


 

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