Simboli nazionali e identità locale: l'architettura, l'urbanistica e i luoghi della socialità

Which role the architecture has had in the process of Westernization of the urban and rural space in a small and peripheral province of contemporary Europe? This paper aims to formulate and to deduce a series of appropriate questions to face the theme of the relationship between globalization and local identity through the analysis of some experiences of architecture and urbanism which are realized in Molise between XIXth and XXth centuries. The author dwells upon the necessity to recognize a witness value in constructive experiences which are frequently uprooted from the logics of valorisation of the local and national heritage (a Bourbon prison, a rural village of fascist age, an industrial site of the republican period), leaving aside from a reading of aesthetical character and underlining the necessity to investigate on the physical remains of a landscape that has never been immovable. In this perspective of research, the paper suggests an interpretation of the local building history as an integral part of a cultural and environmental history of the Western World.