On the journey between Rome and Byzantium they set sail from Egnatia for the world. In Egnazia the world has returned and Puglia – according to Michele Masneri – has launched itself (if there was still a need) into the world. But first the New York Times and later Francesco Merlo and Concita De Gregorio in Repubblica didn’t like all this, because the world, organized in the G7, took up residence in a village built on the borders of the ancient necropolis. Borgo Egnaza, precisely. It’s brand new and has no identifying features, are the accusations. It is not the real Italy and the real Puglia, it is the sentence. And here Karl Kraus would be enough to act as the Court of Cassation: “I have to communicate something ruinous to the aesthetes: once upon a time, old Vienna was new.” Nothing is ever old before it has been new. And there is nothing about the “real” Italy or Puglia of yesterday that was not considered “false” before yesterday.
It’s so logical that a suspicion arises. Could it have been a prejudice that inspired the NYT, Merlo and Di Gregorio? Could there be some problem with the freedom of expression of thought, including architectural thought, whose success is not sanctioned by “aesthetes” but by the market? It will be as it will be, the fact is that Borgo Egnazia was born as a new thing to enrich old things. “Vetera novis augere et perficere”, Pope Francis could have said, if he had been asked, recalling Leo XIII. And this new thing, unbelievably, was authorized by a centre-left Fasano municipal council. Yes, center-left. It’s not a typo. It is the centre-left as it should be.
Here’s the story in short form. In the early 1970s there was very little tourism in Fasano and a local banker, Pierino Bianco, promoted the Itala company. More than a company, a forerunner investment fund: the savings of around 170 well-intentioned people from Fasano and Bari were collected, mostly to buy land, build hotels, encourage those with a lot of money to spend to spend and consume, so as to provide work to who doesn’t have a dish to put on the table. Basically, the cerulean-colored sweater from “The Devil Wears Prada”. The history of the Itala company begins with the Hotel Sierra Silvana in Selva di Fasano and the Hotel del Levante in Torre Canne. These two hotels, together with the Hotel Terme di Torre Canne, combined the largest tourist offer until the early 2000s.
But let’s keep back. The Itala company, today owner of two other excellent resorts – Torre Coccaro and Torre Maizza (managed by the Forte group) – sold some more or less contiguous lands in Savelletri to Sergio Melpignano, a proud and ingenious native of Fasano but transplanted to Rome, who until that moment he shared the role of a great tourist and traveler with tourism, but he was involved a bit for fun in transforming an old farm (purchased with his brother Stefano for family holidays) into a high quality hotel: San Domenico. On those lands Melpignano will build Borgo Egnazia, the San Domenico golf course and – something very rare even in the works of the most unbridled supporters of common goods when they come to power – a large lawn on the sea for rigorous public and free use. Before then there had never been anything on those lands, not even vegetation, probably uprooted to organize a small military airport during the Second World War.
And here is a digression. Until 25 years ago, Fasano and its territory (but also a large part of Puglia) offered the enchanting landscape to the most impressive raids to shelter loads of contraband cigarettes. A city with large segments of the population “operating” in the Marlboros and the coast used for mooring boats or, alternatively, as a resting place for couples with a car in search of privacy. A few years before the “Primavera” operation, organized by the minister Enzo Bianco, whose father was from Fasano, the armored vehicles of “blondes” were speeding by, also claiming victims, and the region defined itself as tourist only because in July and August it closed for holidays , rushing to wear holiday clothes: away with long trousers and moccasins, in with Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, Mexico or Dr. Scholl’s clogs, even in the memorable imitation versions. The tourists, in practice, were the same Apulian people who had changed their clothes.
In this picture, outlined in digression, Sergio Melpignano presented the Borgo Egnazia practice to the municipality, in a package of practices regarding 31 other proposals from other entrepreneurs; construction as a variant of the Master Plan, because rarely in planning documents is there a program that does not end up in sociology or “idolatry”, and interpreting a visionary streak that was difficult to understand at the time.
The City Council, in the session of 10 August 2000, within a few hours and unanimously, approved the 32 variations to the Prg, triggering what would then be carried out by subsequent administrations of all political colours.
That evening, August 10, 2000, fear or perhaps terror dominated in that city council. “I’m sure that when we get down from here we will find the van waiting for us,” said an old municipal councilor, also to quell the somewhat irresponsible enthusiasm of the proposing councilor (the writer) and thinking about events from just a few years earlier; to that dawn at the beginning of the summer of 1993, when at the request of the Brindisi Prosecutor’s Office, five people, including politicians and technicians, were unjustly arrested and sent to prison for a change of destination for tourist use, strictly without works, of a farm (Cardinal’s Mouthful); taken to prison for having done what is now sanctioned by law, hoped for and abundantly incentivized with public funding, to convince the world to choose Puglia.
The Borgo Egnazia approved by the city council, designed by the Lupoi studios of Rome and De Leonardis of Fasano, under the consultancy of Pino Brescia, a prodigious artist unknown at the time, was much larger than the one subsequently built, resized to comply with numerous limitations and requirements of the landscape and archaeological Superintendencies, and of the various environmental authorities.
Is Borgo Egnazia all new? Yes, everything is new. What was there before in that place? Nothing. And if there had been nothing left, probably, the world would never have returned to Egnazia, because the old things, even if well renovated, would not have been able to contain it.
With Borgo Egnazia, but not only, the public administrations chose to do something strongly realistic, with its old and its new, reformist and therefore strongly identifying. Let this “ruinous” news be communicated to all aesthetes: the new Puglia, the new Fasano and the new Borgo Egnazia will one day become old and will become the “real” Italy, the “real” Puglia and will please the NYT, Merlo and the De Gregorio who will come.
