Il Club
Beauty just a stone's throw from home
This trip to the most beautiful villages of Italy began with a reading, the Sillabari by Goffredo Parise. At a certain point in his life, Parise left Rome to go live in a cottage, "a small, elderberry-scented Eden" outside Venice. It wasn't exactly an ancient village, but it was an enchanting place nonetheless, around which began to sprout the warehouses, apartment buildings, and boxy houses typical of the chaotic developments of 1970s Italy.
Parise, who did not dislike cities and was not a loner, was seeking a place where he could look into himself, face his own ghosts and his imagination: a place where he could "breathe in the sense of time," and smell the "odor of life and its seasons."
The villages are these enchanting places, whose centuries-old beauty transcends our lives, and thus it is our duty to protect them. The first step is to catalog them. How many are there in Italy? According to a very approximate estimate, there could be two hundred "very beautiful" villages. We will have a definite answer in a few years, when the classification work is completed. In the meantime, the revisiting - contained in this guide - of the squares, fortresses, castles, towers, public buildings, private residences, churches, bell towers, landscapes, festivals, local products, histories, etc. prove to us that Italy truly is the most beautiful country in the world. What is urgently needed is to preserve and pass down to the next generations this immense cultural and environmental heritage, largely unknown to most people.
The value of beauty lies in its power to guide us: just a stone's throw from home, there are worlds that we don't know; we have the opportunity to go on truly "exotic" vacations, far from the stereotypes of mass tourism. An alternative to the "non-places" in town, anonymous and alike everywhere - and an alternative life, because, to paraphrase Pound, to proceed slowly is beauty.
Claudio Bacilieri
Scientific Committee, Club of the Most Beautiful Villages in Italy