CREATIVE

From duties, the rights

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Calabria is an “old” region, with low birth rates and huge emigration of young people (source: Istat 2017). With a bit less of 2 million inhabitants, it’s not just one of the poorest region in Europe, but it’s the one with one of the most fearful organised crime. All the well-being indicators considers our region underdeveloped. According to tSole 24 ore, Calabrian provinces are at the bottom for quality of life.

    While talking about Calabria one gets into a suffering mood; it’s digging deeper into details, but also into the common social and cultural condition of the many possible “Souths” around us, that before being physical places of amazing beauty and ordinary or awful ugliness, they become it into its inhabitants’ minds. Then here it is that believing in a common project is arduous. But hoping for good with the others for a fairer society seems always more important.

    The law philosopher of Cosenza, Tommaso Greco, writes: “The challenge is to be able to think a status of a citizen relying not just on the package of rights that bind us to the State and the institutions, but also on the type and the quantity of human relationship that we are able to establish and preserve thanks to our duties.”

Our region’s improvement of living conditions must go past the direct effort of the individual, since we are convinced that many Calabrian people want to turn pessimism into energy for change.

     In fact there is no lack, in our region, of people who get engaged in their small realities, or even illustrious ones.

Cosenza’s emblematic figure can surely be Bernardino Telesio, naturalist and philosopher of the 16th century. Telesio was one of the main naturalist during the Italian Renaissance, the first that split the studying of natural phenomena from metaphysics.

In fact, with his most important work, “De rerum natura iuxta propria principia”, he affirms that to understand nature we must study it by its own laws. Bernardino Telesio, the man that Bacon will define as “the first of the moderns”, will influence the following thoughts and culture.

     He dies in 1588. During the rainy afternoon of his funeral, a young friar was seen in Cosenza’s church. He was Tommaso Campanella, at the age of 20. When he was 15 he joined the Dominican order and in Placanica’s monastery he had discovered Telesio’s writings. As soon as he could, he went to Cosenza to meet what he considered to be a teacher. Unfortunately, he only came to learn that Telesio was dead. We see his “City of the Sun” as a tribute to the great Bernardino and to all the Calabrians. A utopia, of course, but to which we should be able to look with responsibility and passion during the most difficult periods of our history.

 

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Cosenza: our polis.

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“Flying on Cosenza coming from the North, we would have a complete and clear image of the city. After the long Crati valley, bordered on the East by the Sila upland and on the West by the Paolan chain, Cosenza looks like a wedge that defends the Valley. In fact, towards the South, at the back of the city, the 2 chains meet up to merge in a natural barrier, creating an autonomus orographic system called “Busento chain” (since from there many tributaries, torrents and streams come to feed the homonymous river). The hill where the ancient Cosenza sands is embraced by the Busento from the South-West, while from the East the city is lapped by the river that gives the name to the Valley: the Crati.”         (L.Addante, Cosenza e i cosentini, Rubettino, 2001)

 

     Brettii (or Bruzi), founders of the city, were an Italic line, in this case Oscan. They were similar to the Lucani, inhabitants of Basilicata, and it’s possible that they were bonded to them by submissive relationship that later had to be cut off.

We know that the Brettii gave name to the whole region, but we don’t know much about their history because of the lack of disposable material. Originally Brettii were a population mainly devoted to sheep-farming and was settled in the area of Sila. Later they became warlike warriors, who threatened the autonomy of the neighbouring Magna Graecia cities. Brettii withstood for long time and tenaciously before giving up on the roman conquest.

According to the ancient historians, the city of Consentia owes its name to the consensus pronounced in the 4th century B.C. by the confederates, or to the “consensus” of the Crati and Cosenza rivers that join up there. Actually, it is way more probable, as the famous linguist John Trumper has very well stated, that the name comes from the word Kos(sa), whose ancient italic root means “dark place”, cave, probably to indicate that the inhabitants lived in dwellings dug into the rock.

     The historical events of the cities are largely similar to the ones of other cities of Southern Italy, first under the Roman oppression and later under barbarian incursions. In particular, the incursion of the Visigoth took place in Cosenza; it is especially recalled the one made by Alarico in 410 A.C.: according to the legend the king with his treasures would have been buried in the river Busento bed, deflecting its waters and then bringing them back on their natural path.

     After a long conflict the region came under Byzantine control that imposed a strong government.

Later the city was the seat of the Longobards’ "GASTALDATO". The Arab incursions, though present and devastating, did not involve a real domination, but provoked the escape of the inhabitants, which strengthened of population of the villages around the city.

     Around the middle of the 11th century the Normans took possession of Calabria and, during this period, in Cosenza began the construction of the castle, built on the ruins of a Saracen fortress. With the marriage between Constance d'Altavilla (last heiress of the Norman dynasty) and Henry VI of Hohenstaufen, the Swabian domination began. With the Swabians and Frederick II Cosenza lived an era of splendour: the Magdalene fair was established (today called St. Joseph fair), the castle was restored and the Cathedral rebuilt.

     The Angevin and then the ARAGONESE dominations followed the Swabian one. Under the ARAGONESE domination Cosenza reached a prominent position in the legal studies field. After Naples, Cosenza became the second city of the kingdom having a cartography. The Accademia Cosentina is founded in 1511 by Aulo Giano Parrasio; it reached its maximum splendour with Bernardino Telesio.

     After two centuries of Spanish domination, the city passed under the Austrian one in 1707 and, after the Polish succession war (1738), the kingdom of Naples passed under the Bourbons who ruled until the advent of the Unification of Italy. During this period, surely not without contrasts, several Masonic and Jacobean secret societies were formed. In 1799 many Cosenza’s inhabitants took part in the revolutionary events of the Neapolitan (PARTENOPEA) Republic: some supported the SANFEDISTI ranks, others stood out as Jacobean patriots and as pro-French.

     During the Napoleonic occupation many public works were carried out, while the trend in force was prevalently libertarian and anticlerical. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when the Bourbons came back, malaise revealed itself in the birth of the first sales, at the Italian level, of the CARBONERIA.

Among the patriotic and liberal movements that affected Cosenza in those years, the most famous is the one of 15 March 1844, ended with a gunfight in Largo dell' Intendenza, between Bourbon soldiers and 21 patriots, who were sentenced to death, although the sentences actually executed were only six. After these events, the Bandiera brothers, who came from Venice to help the inhabitants of Cosenza, were sentenced and killed along with seven other officers on 25 July 1844, in Rovito deep valley.

     With the Unification, Cosenza’s bourgeoisie celebrated its triumph, showing its strength especially in the commercial and legal fields, where the percentage of lawyers who also became mayors was very high.

     Until the advent of fascism, politics was led from the political class coming from Cosenza forum. The fascist propaganda was able to take root in Cosenza only at the end of the Thirties. Until then Cosenza had been mostly hostile to the regime. Then came to the fore new characters having different professional and cultural biographies from the past. One of these was Michele Bianchi, one of the quadrumviri, journalist and trade unionist. Bianchi owes the realization of one of the most characteristic quarters of modern Cosenza.

     After World War II, between 1951 and 1961 also Cosenza took advantage of the general recovery climate due to the economic boom. Building speculation called back in the city small and large landowners, who sniffed out the possibilities of gain and put their land at disposal to build the new part of the city.

     Cosenza saw the proliferation of huge popular quarters detached from the urban center and without roads and infrastructures. This type of urbanization involved a kind of class division, also visible in the ancient city, with the inhabitants who moved to the new part of the city, selling or renting old houses to immigrant families.

     In 1964 Cosenza was crossed by an important south road infrastructure: the Salerno-Reggio Calabria motorway. The city was equipped with important urban and extra-urban roads: the connection between the motorway junction and the Crotone-Paola clearway, Mancini bridge, which connects the new part of the city to the ancient, the new Cosenza-Paola railway and the new Vaglio Lise railway station were created. In those years was even born the idea of ​​creating a University in Cosenza which was later built in the adjoining Rende.

     Today Cosenza, to better saying, the metropolitan area, is an unstable balanced area, with many problems, but however is a culturally and socially lively city. The university, theatres, including that of tradition such as the Rendano, the Academy of music, the various museums, from the National to that of Bretti and Enotri, the Libraries, the National and Civic ones, the numerous cultural and voluntary associations attest that we, Cosenza’s citizens, feel the weight of the Telesian tradition, and confirm the desire to fight, having as a possible development flywheel our culture, knowledge and the respect for our territory . But we also know that to do so we must engage against the many resistance of those that tend not to respect the rules of civil coexistence.

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Landscape and environmental degradation.

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     Salvatore Settis wrote in his illuminating essay "Landscape Constitution Cement": "you only need to look out of the window: we will see terraced houses where yesterday there were dunes, beaches and pine forests, we will see mansards badly perched on rooftops once harmonious, on already airy and flowered terraces. We will see what was the ‘Beautiful Country’ submerged by inexorable cement flows.”

Cosenza, unfortunately, is not an exception. We have two cities, separated and united but both in a different way. It is the proof of how it’s possible to rise up new centers and move elsewhere the fulcrum of the active city by destroying the ancient. In the ancient city blows the air of ancient Naples. A clutter of buildings, a "kasbah" of noble remains, covers the steep hill, crossed by tortuous alleys, broken by steps and underpasses. There are many tenement buildings, sometimes with pergola outdoor staircases, residences, churches; almost agglomerating all the styles debris that dominate in Naples, from the Gothic to the Catalan. These alleys’ life, practically does not exist due to depopulation, ends up on the main road, which runs alongside them and is called Corso Telesio. It is a narrow, steep, also tortuous, much-travelled road by cars of all kinds “SPACCANAPOLI”. A city in degradation, but wonderful, which must be restored. We want it and it is for this reason that we document it.