La centralità della montagna in una inedita forma di urbanità: una controstoria per nutrire la nostra immaginazione

The article stems from an awareness of the fact that current models of organisation of the territory are undergoing great changes and that the interpretative categories we habitually use for them no longer suffice to express the range of transformations underway. It attempts to contradict the impression that the urban concept must traditionally be associated with an idea of city as having a centralised, delimited and circumscribed shape. It does so, following in the tracks of Scott and Soja, proposing the embryos of a counter-history illustrated by some significant moments, aiming to show how the actual idea of urban has created diverse spatial organisms in the course of history, in which, notwithstanding the urban/rural dichotomy, the mountains themselves have sometimes taken on a role of great centrality. In observing the familiar connection between the destination of the land and the numerous contemporary signs showing us that a “new loving trend’ appears to be binding the mountains to the cities, the article invites us to reappraise the territory, drawing on the genealogy proposed: no longer external and peripheral but rather an integral part of an extended, polyphonic city. The expression, therefore, of a new relationship of co-belonging between man and nature wherein – with increased closeness between densification and gaps, slowness and speed, deserted spots and high-density nodes – silent places may also finally be listened to and the mountain acquire unprecedented centrality.