The lands around us are full of history, and a great deal of this history is embodied by the old buildings. The term “history” means not only epic battles to be told, armies, fortresses and monuments. There is a humbler history behind them, that is the simple and genuine history of the common folk, which still lives thanks to the walls of the houses that hosted people in the past.

These simple examples of cultural heritage are too often left to rot by the roadsides and in the middle of our countryside, just because their redevelopment is considered economically inconvenient. In the meantime, those great monsters of iron and steel that we call bulldozers and cranes keep on binging on our green areas. Immense chasms open up and entire fields become new, clean pours of concrete on which new living hives, often of dubious taste, are built.

Restoring and recovering old buildings has a double value and gain: in the first place we do not further disfigure the landscape stealing land from the Earth, and secondly, we keep our tradition alive.

Redeveloping is better than breaking down and rebuilding. The voracity with which thousands of hectares of land disappear under the hunger for new buildings is frightening, especially in places and times in which buildings are not lacking and, indeed, they watch us as they yield under the weight of the owners’ carelessness.