The Discreet Charm of Italy’s Romagna Region

Guido Piovene was wont to say that Italy was at its best in those regions that had not disowned their rural origins and where the links with the land had not been severed. For Piovene, a prime example of this was Tuscany. Indeed, with its longstanding and continuing prosperity, this region has always been rooted firmly in its land. Romagna (the more coastal area of the Emilia-Romagna region) is another example. For Piovene, traditional Romagna was always visible on the surface. It was not only seen and heard in the words and attitudes of its people but constituted the very essence of the region. In fact, between the two traditional “Romagnas” – the one on the surface and the one deep down – lies a land that has always been confronted by and has engaged with modernity. This was brilliantly portrayed in a scene of one of Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpieces, Novecento – set in Romagna – in which what we would today call an enlightened, progressive landowner explains to his farmers and sharecroppers the advantage of his new-fangled purchase: a combustion-engine harvester. Despite the seductive explanation, the farmers and sharecroppers are skeptical. They are neither for nor against “progress”.

They understand it but at the same time fear the machine will disrupt their ingrained habits and, at the end of the day, uproot them from the land and remove the traditional methods that underpin their very existence. Traveling today in what we could call heartland Romagna where the architecture firm Piraccini+Potente Architettura, the focus of this episode of our “Journey to Italy”, mainly operates, it is obvious that the landscape has not changed much since Piovene’s time. It remains essentially an agricultural area that despite the arrival of mechanization has not been completely industrialized.

Of course, sharecropping and its raison d’être is a thing of...

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