Paesaggi inumani. I silos granari come monumenti (Inhuman landascape. Grain silos are monuments)

In the Code of the cultural heritage, protection (art. 3) is designed to «ensure the protection and conservation for the purposes of public use» and the valorisation (art. 6) «to ensure the best conditions for use and public enjoyment of the same cultural heritage». Thus if we can say that man is the central consideration of both protection and valorisation via his opportunity to enjoy cultural heritage, then we have to ask: and if the man cannot enter inside because the building is not designed for this? Are we in front of a building that will never aspire to be cultural heritage? Or are we in front of an oversight of law with important implications. These questions find their motivation in the case of grain silos and, more in general, all those structures for storage which are, at the same time, essential to the work of the territory and an integral part of the agricultural landscape. The storage structures belong to a long tradition of construction; they are built for humans but do not provide any form of hospitality, or even transit, for man himself. If as Bruno Zevi said: «the principal character of architecture is that it works with a three-dimensional vocabulary that includes man», then it could be described as structures with inhuman destiny. It should be noted that inhuman (inumano) is not used here as a synonym for inhuman (disumano). In does not have only a privative meaning. In is mainly inside but also to and entirely. Inhuman (disumano) has got only a negative connotation: contrary to human nature. In a time when the landscape is characterized by buildings and constructions that tend, increasingly, to look like storage facilities, perhaps the real question is that of Jean-François Lyotard: «And if the "own" of man was to be inhabited by the inhuman?»