Undersecretary Vacca calls for Lodi City Council to restore the Vegetable Cathedral as it was

Last April 24, on these pages, we gave news that the City of Lodi wants to tear down the Vegetable Cathedral, the great monument designed by Giuliano Mauri (Lodi Vecchio, 1938 - Lodi, 2009) and severely damaged due to bad weather and neglect: of the 108 columns that the work had when it was inaugurated (only on April 23, 2017), just twenty-eight remain standing.

Member of Parliament Tommaso Foti of Fratelli d’Italia had also launched a parliamentary question as early as January 15 in which he asked the government whether information had been acquired on the findings of the technical surveys regarding the state of the Vegetable Cathedral, and whether it was not the case to initiate checks on a work that “for only 18 months already has been in a situation of non-usability.”

Over the weekend came the response from the undersecretary for cultural heritage, Gianluca Vacca: "the Vegetable Cathedral,“ Vacca’s response reads, ”represents the most important work of Giuliano Mauri, among the major exponents of Italian Art in Nature, a European artistic tendency born in the 1970s as a counterbalance to American Land Art with the main purpose of intervening in a minimal way on nature, with a strong emphasis on the will of defense towards the landscape,“ and Mauri himself has been ”recognized as a fundamental figure of the relationship between living and nature“ (a role confirmed by invitations to the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale). Although no information appears to have reached the government through notes or official documents ”either regarding the events of the work or the results of the technical expertise,“ the undersecretary ”believes that the work represents an important artistic intervention on Italian soil in recent years, the value of which is recognized not only by wide public attention but also by sector critics."

For these reasons, as well as out of respect for the wishes of the artist (who wanted his home territory to have a sign of his work), the undersecretary considers it appropriate, subject to landscape authorization, “the restoration of the installation by the Municipality of Lodi, following in a careful and scrupulous manner the indications given by the author of the project, after any technical and safety verifications.” All this will have to be accompanied by “a continuous maintenance activity also due to the [sic] organic nature of the work.”

Undersecretary Vacca calls for Lodi City Council to restore the Vegetable Cathedral as it was

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