Pavia is poor, very poor indeed, in remains of his most ancient Past.
But the Past does not only manifest itself in individual testimonies immediately obvious of easily recognizable, such as a statue, an inscription, a monument; you can often find on a large scalean extraordinary unnoticed continuity over time, built and almost hidden in the Present, in urban, landscape and environmental areas, in which men usually live unaware of the deep debt they have with ancient times. An example is the perfect geometry of the urban figure of Pavia: the existing roads are modeled on the old streets and the plan goes back directly to the first-century-BC planning. Most people do not notice a major phenomenon that affects everyone in daily life:when we move in the historical center, we follow path derived ultimately from the specific choices made by the Romans in obedience to the city exposure rules to the winds and the sun and in accordance with the ancient flowing direction of the Ticino river.
The great geometrical structure of the plain in the north of Pavia, which the Romans wisely elaborated in the first century BC, exercised in the passing of time a primary role in attracting and orderly distribute the settlements of towns and farmsteads. The origins and shapes of settlements of Lomello, Dorno and Cozzostrictly depend on the great Lomellina path, which led to "end of the World" (Atlantic Ocean, North Sea), still evident nowadays in the ground along the ancient track, more than 2.000 years after its construction. These are places, the traces of which appear permanently fixed in the "memory of the earth", which is often far more tenacious than the one of men in preserving and transmitting the characters of the past. There are then places that for the features and the natural look have a "fabulous" ability and often they induce ordinary people to interpret subjectively and fantastically complex environmental and historical realities: Sommo, the extreme limit of Lomellina towards the Po River, represented since the Roman Age a critical point of the unstable relationship of men with lands and waters in the reflection of poets and local historians; the large cavities of Siccomario, which opens where once merged the Ticino and Po rivers near Pavia, was considered an ancient sea, from which the waters slowly receded making space to the lands; in Santa Sofia, dominating in solitude the deep valley of the Ticino River, the medieval tradition laid the foundation of Pavia, before the Gauls moved in the the current Pavia for a divine sign. Ancient writings, local historical traditions, parchment documentsand historical maps, recent aerial and satellite surveys, to whose evidence helped the expertise of Fiorenzo Cantalupi, were the foundation of the exhibition that the University Library of Pavia hosted in the Teresian Hall from 24 September to 16 November 2016. Deep gratitude goes on one hand to the University Library, on the other to Giuseppe and Paolo Fedegari, who have translated images and texts into a book to illustrate the origins of their hometown.
The writer is sure that men establish with the places they live a relationship that is repeated and renewed day by day: from custom originates knowledge and sense of belonging originates respect, from respect originates the protection of a common good to be transmitted, not offended, to future generations.
... From custom originates knowledge and sense of belonging, from the knowledge and from sense of belonging originates respect, from respect origintaes the protection of a common good to be transmitted, not offended, to future generations...
- Pierluigi Tozzi -
The memory of the earth strength
Ciò che siamo oggi è il prodotto di una lunga evoluzione, di un cammino iniziato migliaia di anni orsono. Ciò che la globalizzazione oggi cerca di nascondere, ciò che demagoghi incapaci cercano di omologare distruggendo secoli di esperienza, noi oggi vogliamo riscoprire e valorizzare.
Fedegari è un’azienda unica sul mercato in cui opera, non unica in Italia.
Un prodotto come quello di Fedegari poteva nascere solo in un ambiente che mette al centro dei propri valori la famiglia, l’etica del lavoro, lo spirito di sacrificio, la manualità e il senso del dovere prendendo esempio dalle testimonianze di chi nel passato ha reso unica la nostra nazione e la nostra civiltà.
L’azienda nasce dalla ferrea volontà di due fratelli - Fortunato e Gianpiero - di creare i migliori sterilizzatori al mondo.
La concretezza, scevra di ogni mondanità mediatica, al limite dell’arroganza, è alla base di ogni decisione dal primo giorno della fondazione.
Nessuna improvvisazione. Solo conoscenze acquisite con l’esperienza, sporcandosi le mani.
Nessun obiettivo economico diretto. Solo l’ambizione di superare i rivali, chiunque e ovunque essi siano.
Una vita senza pace, guidati dai valori di chi ci ha preceduti, in famiglia, ma anche secoli addietro, da chi non ha mai avuto paura di sfidare il mondo armato solo del proprio coraggio e del proprio ingegno. Ecco perché Fedegari poteva nascere solo in Italia.
Non è possibile decontestualizzare un’impresa come questa che sfugge alla logica imperante della globalizzazione. Quindi è importante comprendere quanto il territorio, la sua storia e i Padri - appunto - hanno influito sulla nascita e sullo sviluppo dell’impresa. Impresa fatta di uomini, sempre differenti gli uni dagli altri. Semplicemente unici.
Scoprire il lavoro di Pierluigi Tozzi e Fiorenzo Cantalupi ha permesso di comprendere come l’ambiente e la Storia che ci circondano hanno influito sulla nostra crescita e sulle nostre scelte strategiche.
La macchina come l’opera dell’uomo. Non intesa come manufatto per generare profitto, ma come segno del proprio passaggio, del proprio saper fare.
Spesso, per comprendere quanto abbiamo sotto gli occhi quotidianamente, dobbiamo cambiare il nostro punto di vista. Ciò che hanno fatto Pierluigi Tozzi e Fiorenzo Cantalupi. Alzandosi in cielo hanno saputo dare valore a quanto ci circonda ma che sovente non vediamo.
Un volume questo che fa riflettere sul valore di chi ci ha preceduti, ma soprattutto di chi ha fatto. Perché solo il fare resta a testimonianza futura del nostro passaggio.
Questo libro lo dedichiamo alla nostra famiglia che ci ha trasmesso tutti questi valori, alla nostra Pavia che ci ha dato i natali, ai nostri uomini e alle nostre donne che, oggi in diverse parti del mondo, li hanno condivisi e ci hanno donato il bene più importante: la loro fiducia.
PREFACE
La tenacia della volontà
... La macchina come opera dell'uomo. Non intesa come manufatto per generare profitto, ma come segno del proprio passaggi, del proprio saper fare.
Spesso per comprendere quanto abbiamo sotto gli occhi quotidianamente, dobbiamo cambiare il nostro punto di vista ...
- Giuseppe & Paolo -
Fedegari
In its delirious omnipotence, modernity has killed the sacredness and the polyphony of voices contained in places. In “L’arte delle città. Filosofia, natura, architettura” (The Art of the Cities. Philosophy, nature, architecture), Raffaele Milani talks about a globalization process. “The places of thought and the artistic civilization of the West have spawned a new direction of taste: the pleasure of disorientation, of the loss of centre, of an identity of sameness.”
Fragmentation, chaos and the unconditional acceptance of precariousness are the key features sketching out postmodernism, in which the moment wins and disposability prevails. Values, human relationships and places are subject to the same commoditization. Space and time constantly accelerate and shrink, with the very concept of three-dimensional space that is shaped by an increasingly shorter need for time.
We are forgetful people – by desire, need or habit – and we enjoy this empty space by planning amnesia. Geographical mobility, delocalization and the transfer of capital have torn down every physical barrier. What remains is an immense global village in which social relations are virtual, no longer tangible but immaterial.
We are breaking the ancient alliance that has always united people to their places, that bond with history and nature through which humankind asserts its identity but also its eternity. “Innumerable gestures, habits, customs, and ways of organizing time and space come to us – as Barrès would say – from the dead” (Tzvetan Todorov, “L’home dépaysé” [The Disoriented Man]). Traditions do not betray and they represent that healthy rootedness in the past on which to base the construction of a future that is still fragile and uncertain.
Pánta rêi. Everything flows, everything migrates. From the pride of belonging to the cowardice of capitalism that, with the conquest of markets, has defeated its origins. The homo oeconomicus in the name of globalization is playing with our roots – social, territorial and professional. The flexible and malleable automaton is reduced to a being “without qualities”. Let us hear it for multitasking, the multidisciplinary and statelessness. Precariousness and mobility are the rock and the hard place in which to compress the neo-kulaks. “To kill them, it had to be explained that the kulaks were not men. Yes, just as when the Germans said: the Jews are not men. Lenin and Stalin did the same thing: the kulaks are not men. But this is a lie! Men! They were men. All men” (Vasily Grossman, All Flowing). This is the tragedy, this is our fate.
What will save us?
As early as 1895, Gustave Le Bon warned that “the age we are about to enter will in truth be the era of crowds”, the divine right of the masses that would destroy all sovereignty and all civilization. The multicultural concept, potentially rich, has merely amplified the sense of diversity, to the detriment of the sense of the other, the person next to us, and of one’s cultural identity. Byung-Chul Han clearly sketched out the solitude and disintegration that characterize the current social form, “the growing selfishness and atomization of society radically narrow the spaces of common action”. The socius gives way to the solus, solidarity vanishes and privatization is extended to the soul. The new inhabitants of the digital era “lack the spirituality of uniting, which would produce an Us”.
Therefore, what can save us is renewed rootedness. In the era of technoscience and sad passions, the task posed in this text is our duty: to preserve and promote the identity of these territories. Culture, traditions, values, landscape. In the great distrust of contemporary society, veering from one crisis to the next, in which crisis itself has become the underlying and prevailing rule, in order to look towards the future we need to learn memory and gain knowledge of the past Those who control the past, control the future. This is a logos over the archaios to arrive at perspectival thought projected forward. It is the not yet as hope and promise.
Today, however, everything is instantaneous. From the myth of absolute power of the homo faber, the builder of history, we have gone to an impotent man who, lacking happiness, is willing to settle for avoiding unhappiness. The complexity of the world has made tomorrow unpredictable and the unstoppable advance of technoscience has merely heightened the weakness of a foundering humanity, in a constant state of emergency. “I was afraid of being in the middle of nothing, being nothing myself. I felt as if I were suffocating, considering and feeling that everything is nothing, nothing solid” (Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone). This terror makes us incapable of processing a thought. Progress has not made us freer. We are all more educated, but are increasingly more ignorant, and the price of ignorance is the lack of freedom. We are modern slaves.
The current anthropological, scientific and environmental change is deconstructing the ways of social existence. The individual is externalized, inconsistent and transparent. There is a lack of body and interior conflict. There are billions of data in which to lose ourselves; technology shouts everything is possible, and yet we are dominated by inertia and launched into paralysis. The macro looms, the micro succumbs. This is the era of the modular man to be thrown away. The society of technoscience has no need for old people and, unfortunately, not for young people either. Here is the new myth of the need to be young at all cost and of infantilism, in which there are no roles, in which there are no fathers and sons. Nevertheless, the old person was the one who preserved memory and the young person the one who fought to build the future.
In this loss of identity, we become the land of conquest, easy prey for a process of complete colonization also of human beings. New totalitarianisms of technicians and experts emerge, the state become therapeutic and the citizen is transformed into a patient who diligently delegates his responsibilities. The recession – not only economic – is under way.
“We must cherish our yesterdays, but never carry them as a burden into the future. Each generation must take nourishment from the other and give knowledge to the one that comes after” (Ardis Whitman).
Memory is the bastion of that collective and individual identity that allows us to have unmistakable citizenship, a sure sense of belonging and certain provenance. It is a historical-cultural identity to be handed down to the generations to come, in a vital continuum of knowledge and reciprocity. It is a restitution in which what prevail are the values of an authentic and infinite history that is no longer destined to be annihilated.
In short, it is a native language and land: this history, this land, this city of Pavia.