All visitors to the “valley of the temples of
Agrigento”, in Sicily, are struck by a double sensation, in fact, arrived
on site, they are immediately struck by the fact that they are only there
ruins : many stones covered in moss, some large capitals
consumed by the wind that continually caresses the valley, and a few enormous ones
columns laid out as if they were resting
on the damp ground...Then slowly everyone takes a walk among the ruins and the crowds of
visitors breaks, disperses: someone, approaching a column,
hugging his shaft in an attempt to measure it she notices how enormous it is
diameter; someone else, intrigued by a large white boulder, begins to
walk around him and, with difficulty, recognize the features of a face made monstrous
and unrecognizable by the enormous size of his features; yet another
he trips on a small stone, turns back to pick it up and slowly
with a finger he begins to remove the earth covering it, he notices a smoothing
thin, precise, perhaps it is a small part of the frieze of the large temple...
will bring home a piece of Greece, or perhaps simply a stone...
Just a few kilometers from the valley that is
it opened onto the sea with the enormous temple of Zeus, the largest Doric temple
of antiquity, more than 30 meters high, probably intended to impress i
visitors with its size, there are instead impressive wreckage of some abandoned buildings over the years
fifty in reinforced concrete: cracked walls, rust-rotted beams, iron
irremediably bent protruding from the pillars, and broken tiles inside
and indestructible toilets. The difference with the ruins of temples is
disconcerting: in this place, reduced to a timeless space, concrete is
broken with sharp edges and hurts the hands, the iron is eaten away by rust and
everything that simulated unity is now decomposed, only one remains
carcass whose parts are scattered everywhere, like pieces of a toy
broken ; the resulting sensation is of decay, destruction, death.
Nature will not accept those wreckage into itself since they are foreign to it and in
enemies fund. They will stay there a little longer and then disappear forever.
The hardness of the concrete is made to resist
stresses of loads, not those of time : in fact it deteriorates
irremediably and in less than two hundred years. And so our homes and ours
city. We won't leave any trace.
The people who built the temples and pyramids
instead they dreamed of eternal constructions that would bear witness to theirs
passage on earth and their civilization. But they knew that there would be time
transformed and perhaps even corrupted those forms that were "too human" for
be able to resist him.
The will of remain,
therefore, it led them to consider it as an inevitable element and destiny itself
of their works. They predicted its action, they mitigated its effects, their own
attention was paid to the choice of materials capable of last; time would have smoothed, worn away, but never
destroyed.
The passage in Greece from the wooden temple to that
of marble, the use made in Rome of the "eternal brick" which imperceptibly
centuries it returns to the land from which it comes, the grandiose Egyptian pyramids
set like crystals among the desert sands, they tell of that
precise will, since this is what they wanted: imprint their signs in nature changing it forever.
Those men who played with stones are now
replaced by large construction companies, whose buildings are made of reinforced concrete
they spread everywhere. They won't last long nor will the material that makes them up
the germ of destruction that is inherent to it: “caementum” in Latin
it means in fact scrap. And such
they will become those agglomerations of houses and buildings built in a very short time
and just as quickly destined to disappear.
The Egyptian pyramids, on the contrary, tired the
centuries with their indestructible mass. And hands that don't exist yet
they will caress the columns of the temple of Zeus in Agrigento perhaps forever.
Those stones - thought of as monuments to time -
they resisted him, allowing history to become memory for the
men and nature to gently reclaim its materials...
Blades of grass have grown among the ruins, moss
he covered the stones...
Armando Di Nardo
Antonella Golia