Every now and then, a fragment of the city falls asleep. It could be an office tower that bankruptcy has left abandoned. A building that hostile heirs leave to its own devices, uninhabited. A gas station rendered useless by changes in traffic patterns. A disused industrial area that has become overgrown with weeds due to neglect and isolation. This is the case of Bosco della Goccia, in Milan's Bovisa district.

As recounted on this blog in What is the Goccia and why does it deserve our attention, the area in question has been closed to the public for a very long time, 130 years, partly because it was only accessible to those involved in the production activities housed there (first managed by Union de Gas and then, until 1994, by Officine del Gas), and partly because, for over thirty years after the activities ceased, it was (almost) impenetrable to the public. For an urban area, where space is at the service of human needs and activities, this is a very long time indeed.

The Sleeping Beauty

Something similar to what we read about in some famous fairy tales has happened to this exhausted city. The best-known example is Perrault's Sleeping Beauty (Rosaspina in the Grimm version): the princess is pricked by a spinning wheel, plunging not only herself but the entire kingdom into unconsciousness, a situation that Walt Disney depicted in his 1959 animated feature film as an untamed and sprawling thicket surrounding the protagonist's castle. Perrault writes: "...in a quarter of an hour, such a quantity of trees, large and small, bushes and brambles grew up around the park that neither animal nor man could ever pass through; nothing could be seen except the towers of the castle, and even those only from a great distance. No one doubted that it was the fairy who had used one of her tricks so that the princess would have nothing to fear from curious onlookers while she slept." A contingency that becomes even more ghostly in the words of the Brothers Grimm: "And the wind fell silent, and not the smallest leaf stirred on the trees in front of the castle. But around the castle grew a hedge of thorns that grew taller every year and eventually surrounded and covered it completely, so that nothing could be seen, not even the flag on the roof. [...] and every now and then a prince would come and try to penetrate the castle through the brambles, but without success, because the brambles held him back as if they had hands, and the young men would get caught in them, unable to free themselves, and die miserably."

In the same way, the abandoned bodies of the city fall into a deep sleep, prey to enchantment. Deserted by the appearance of life, they become strangely invisible, as if emptied by a sudden lack of meaning within the human system to which they belong and yet, in essence, dormant, waiting for something else or, rather, for a forthcoming awakening that time conceals. It is time, in fact, that becomes the great protagonist of these places, grasping their identity, transfiguring them, and multiplying their mystery. It is not death, but an induced sleep that only an event close to a miracle can interrupt, such as the emergence of a new, extraordinary meaning to break the spell.

In the case of La Goccia, one could say, among other things, reversing the point of view of the fairy tale, that it was the long human slumber that allowed for a vital change of destination (and anarchic, according to our point of view, but not according to natural parameters), creating, within the urban perimeter, a parallel kingdom where nature, after thoroughly probing the available soil, compromised by man, has recolonized it according to strategies of wildness that are alien to us and still largely unknown.

©Camilla Morino

The forest in Perrault and the Brothers Grimm

In the two passages I have quoted, it is worth noting a subtle but significant difference: while in Perrault's words the forest that suddenly sprouted is described as an impenetrable protection for Belle's peaceful sleep, in the Grimm brothers' words the wild nature that has besieged the castle over time traces a cursed and ominous perimeter, making the princess inaccessible and killing her potential liberators. This difference essentially affects all fairy tales in which the protagonists, having abandoned their homes, venture into a dense forest that they cross or in which they get lost or have dangerous encounters or are kidnapped (Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Tom Thumb...), or where they hide, seeking safety, shelter, freedom, refuge (The Wild Swans, Snow White, Dognipelo...). The forest and wild nature are characterized by significant symbolic and semantic ambiguity, appearing at times destructive and at times salvific, often within the same text. This ambiguity has gone far beyond the realm of fairy tales to enter our perception whenever we encounter forests, woods, and, in general, wild environments that are foreign to us. We are intensely fascinated by them and quickly sense the threat as soon as the perception of loss of control over the environment, which jeopardizes our sense of integrity, exceeds the threshold.

Cities and nature

The relationship between cities and nature appears to be marked by the same dissociation in situations where urban control gradually ceases to act according to its own logic of use and, following abandonment, a new model of growth replaces it, favoring the development of wild natural areas. While on the one hand these areas are seen by residents as areas of spontaneous restoration of lost ecosystems, healthier and therefore of public utility, capable of improving the quality of life, and therefore to be protected, cared for, and preserved, on the other hand they are perceived as potentially dangerous areas or used as landfills or illegally colonized by segments of the population 'without shelter or law,' frequented for illegal activities or as a refuge for clandestine, uncontrolled lives, like unwanted animals and weeds. In this sense, the process of concealment that the two fairy tales mentioned above point to plays a fundamental role: in the fairy tale, the forest hides what is inside its perimeter from outside eyes. The lush vegetation is such that it conceals the traces of civilization: the towers, the castle. This is a real process of erasure that nature puts into action, reminding man that it has an insurmountable primacy over him, even though this is usually removed from human culture. Compared to what happens in fairy tales, where nature is both mother and stepmother, in the relationship between city and nature, there is an additional problem that complicates matters.

As Luciana Bordin and Francesca Grazzini recount in Più grigio che verde. Dieci anni di lotta per il bosco la Goccia di Bovisa (More gray than green. Ten years of struggle for the Goccia di Bovisa forest), in the master plan drawn up by Rem Koolhaas's architectural firm, which was presented in 2012 by the Municipality of Milan to the Monti government for the construction of a new neighborhood in the Goccia area, the forest was not mentioned; instead, there was talk of urban void.

It would not be inappropriate to think of this definition, which denied not only the actual state of the area (returned to nature) but also its history and its destination, as a striking example of the phenomenon of plant blindness, a term coined by Elisabeth Schlusser and James Wandersee in 1998 to describe the inability of humans to see plants and recognize their dignity as living beings. A well-known experiment illustrates the issue. Test participants are shown images in which 90% of what is seen consists of plants and 10% of animals. When asked what the image shows, the general response indicates the presence of animals. Plant species, perceived as indistinct, remain in the background, invisible, but above all completely absent as subjects.

Saint George and the Forest

The cover of the 1995 Mondadori edition of Simon Shama's Landscape and Memory, an essay that explores the cultural history of myths and cults surrounding trees and forests, highlighting their traces in landscape, art, chronicles, and literature, reproduces a painting by Albrecht Altdorfer, Saint George and the Forest (ca. 1510). The painting shows a tiny saint on horseback and an equally tiny and almost indistinguishable dragon, immersed in a lush forest. Here, the opposite of what happens in the above-mentioned test occurs. The artist's aim is to hide the presence of the knight, who blends into the vegetation, almost becoming part of the forest.

Shama writes: "The apparent subject of the painting is St. George, who seems to have come to pay homage to the dragon rather than to kill it. And although the saint appears, according to convention, as the embodiment of the miles christianus, the knight who fights the forces of hell, the miniaturization of the action (in a work that is already small in size) reinforces the impression that the Teutonic forest plays a heroic role here at least equal to that of the Christian knight. [...] The panel represents a veritable revolution in landscape painting, not least because of the extraordinary care with which Altdorfer faithfully reproduces the conventions of ornamental foliage in religious architecture, thus creating a space that acquires strong connotations of sacredness. This does not mean, however, that Altdorfer's trees are stylized to the point of being unrecognizable. On the contrary. The artist's scientific rigor, worthy of a Leonardo or a Dürer, is evident, but the painting transcends the simple accumulation of naturalistic details, creating the extraordinary effect of an all-consuming forest, where the viewer feels almost oppressed and blinded by the lush foliage. [...] Thus, observing how the leaves cast light on other leaves, which accumulate and overlap in successive curtains of densely intertwined foliage, we begin to realize that here the narrative is the forest itself. The Germanic forest is no longer a backdrop, it is history.

Shama's essay traces the history of the contrasting, fluctuating and never linear relationship between opposing conceptions of the wild in Northern European cultures, particularly Germanic ones, which exalted nature as the origin and reservoir of the primal force of the peoples who inhabited it, and in Mediterranean cultures, particularly classical and then Christian ones, in which the sign of civilization is the city, the urbs, and the landscape is dominated by architecture, an expression of human genius that dictates rules, order, and harmony, and nature is the frightening and brutal space (and, with the advent of Christianity, pagan and demonic) in which the forces of evil operate. A striking example of the persistence of the myth of the forest in German culture can be found, as Shama recalls, in the Grimm fairy tales collected by the two brothers also as a ‘patriotic weapon’ to oppose the new Napoleonic empire, heir to the values of Romanity: ‘It is in fact impossible, as Jack Zipes and several other authors note, to think of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales without evoking the forest. It is always a forest in northern Germany: a place of firs, beeches, monstrous deformed oaks, twisted and enveloping like Kolbe's devouring plant monsters or the ‘elf king’ of the alders, destroyer of children, in Goethe's astonishing poem ‘The Elf King’. It is also the place where Hänsel, Gretel, Franzl, not to mention sailors and soldiers, run the risk of being robbed, murdered, devoured, or undergoing mutations in their appearance, or all of these things together. The forest is a place of terror, then. But it is also a dispenser of justice. The rules of Roman law do not apply here: social status and the force of traditional law are lost who knows where in the maze of its paths. The ungrateful girl who rejects the elves who brought her strawberries picked in the snow is severely punished: toads, instead of words, come out of her mouth when she tries to speak. The bandit who wants to rob, tear apart, and salt the bride gets what he deserves at the wedding banquet. The princess is reunited with the twelve brothers from whom she was separated on the day of her birth. The ordeal precedes the resurrection. Religion and patriotism, antiquity and the future: everything is mixed together in the romantic vision of the forest. Characters who have been asleep for centuries can come back to life: not least Germany itself.

This passage exemplifies the symbolic duality assumed over time by nature, of which the forest is the central expression and of which trees are among the most enigmatic incarnations, endowed with strength, longevity, resilience, vitality, and a miraculous capacity for rebirth.

San Giorgio nella Foresta ©Albrect Altdorfer

Pinocchio, Thumbelina, and others

In this regard, it is worth mentioning some fairy tale characters who came to life from trees and the plant world. First and foremost, Pinocchio, a wooden boy, a brilliant interpreter of extraordinary adventures on land and sea, endowed with superhuman energy, an exemplary parable of childhood in which wildness and domestication, nature and culture struggle, as Veronica Bonanni highlights in her beautiful essay La fabbrica di Pinocchio (The Pinocchio Factory): 'Pinocchio, due to his wooden constitution rooted in myth, thus rises to become a symbol of childhood: his vegetal and wild nature is the most suitable metaphor for that age of life in which man, not yet civilized, is closest to nature. Children, with their magical vision and desire for absolute freedom, appear to adults as savages to be tamed, to be subjected to the rules of civilized society through the educational process. In this sense, Master Cherry's plane, which smoothes and polishes the piece of wood to roughen it and make it more presentable, is the image of the violence inherent in all education, which consists first and foremost in removing, depriving, and restraining.

From a barley seed planted in a pot, in a famous story by Hans Christian Andersen, Thumbelina is born, a micro-girl capable of crossing the natural kingdoms and, in the underworld inhabited by a mole, where she dwells like a new Proserpina, of transforming death into life (just as happens to Pinocchio himself, the undisputed champion of metamorphosis).

In The Love of Three Pomegranates, a fairy tale contained in Italo Calvino's Italian Fairy Tales (and with numerous versions, including those by Basile and Gozzi), three mysterious girls emerge from three pomegranates; the one who survives the strange vegetable birth undergoes several metamorphoses: from death, at the hands of the ugly Saracina, to life, and from a drop of her blood sprouts a pomegranate tree capable of resurrecting the dead.

In the Grimm version, Cinderella, who has been orphaned, receives a hazel branch as a gift from her father (unlike her sisters, who receive clothes, pearls, and gems). The twig, planted on her mother's grave and watered with copious tears, becomes a small tree inhabited by magical birds that speak, grant the girl's wishes, and reveal the misdeeds of her stepsisters. Also in Grimm's collection, in the fairy tale The Juniper Tree, the bones of a dead mother and then those of her little son, buried under the plant, magically animate the juniper tree, from which a fairy bird is born that, singing, reveals the crimes of a cannibalistic and murderous stepmother. And we could continue to cite examples of this fairy-tale mixture of human and plant.

Not to mention how the theme appears in literature and myth, as in Ovid's poem, rich in dendro-metamorphosis, from Daphne to Narcissus, from Hyacinth to Myrrha, from Philemon and Baucis to Clitia and Dryope, to name but a few; or in the Aeneid, where Virgil makes blood and voice spill, “Quid me miserum Aenea laceras?” from the branch of the bush into which Polydorus, son of Priam, murdered by his uncle Polymestor, has been transformed; or in Canto XIII of Inferno, where Dante takes up the same situation: "Why do you cut me? Have you no spirit of pity? We were men, and now we are brushwood," protests the suicidal Pier della Vigna, who has become a plant.

Names and words

It is interesting to note how, in the language of fairy tales, trees and plants in general are named precisely, with reference to the species (juniper, hazel, pomegranate, oak, fir, elderberry, pear, apple, snowdrop, carnation, rose, daisy, turnip, parsley, rosemary, flax, buckwheat...). In pre-industrial and agricultural cultures, where the relationship with animals and plants was constant and daily, names not only had decisive practical importance, but also expressed the deep and symbolic relationship between humans and nature. Gian Luigi Beccaria explains this in his essay I nomi del mondo (The Names of the World), dedicated to lost words: "In pre-scientific tradition and popular mentality, nature was seen as animated, inhabited by animal-demons and herbs endowed with a plant soul; everything had its own genius, its own spirit. Plants, herbs, and animals were placed in a circle of correspondences between earth and cosmos. The immanence of the divine in the cosmos broadened the possibilities and functions of plants and animals, establishing a sort of commonality between the physical and the supernatural that became an animated fullness. Nature was conceived as marked, a sign of the reversible reciprocity of the relationships between things and humans. A dark power was preserved in the juices, leaves, roots, and flowers of herbs. And animals were endowed with a higher power. Some of the names used to designate them still allow us to perceive the surprising relationship of communication between man and nature, to measure the enormous distance that separates the heavens and the earth of today from the earth and heavens of a not-so-distant yesterday, animated by gods and demons, moved by occult and mysterious forces. Everything was pervaded by the breath of the spirit, and this did not arise solely from the realm of dreams and fantasies. There was a real symbiosis between man and the plant world, plants, herbs, smells, aromas, juices, poisons."

In this regard, Carl Safina's account in Alfie and I of the systematic elimination of names from the natural world is indicative of the linguistic change underway: "In 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary began to eliminate entries such as ‘heron,’ 'leopard,' and 'oyster. They weren't used enough, they said. Instead, entries such as ‘bandwidth’ and ‘chat room’ were added. Famous authors wrote a passionate letter urging that the language of nature be preserved. They argued that a dictionary ‘should contribute to children's understanding of the world, not merely reflect its trends’. A concerned public submitted a similar petition, to no avail. Words such as “almond,” “blackberry,” and ‘carnation’ were removed in favor of “analog,” “graph block,” and “celebrity.” Oxford University Press responded by saying that previous versions of their children's dictionaries included numerous flower names “because many children lived in semi-rural environments and observed the seasons.” Hamster, herring, kingfisher, lark, lobster, magpie, sandpiper, mussel, newt, otter, ox, panther—all were deleted. Author Robert Macfarlane pointed out the obvious problem: we cannot know what we cannot name; we cannot care about something we do not know. The moment we delete the words of nature, we lose the desire to know it and then forget how to remember it.

The people of the uncultivated land

Returning to our starting point, namely urban forests which, after long periods of neglect, are spontaneously recreating themselves, even in inhospitable areas or areas altered by urban and industrial contamination, it is not surprising that these new uncultivated areas (the “forests in disarray,” to use a beautiful definition by Sandro Campani in his novel Alzarsi presto) in the new and completely unpredictable order of the sixth mass extinction due to climate change, become for large sections of the population the symbolic places of a possible and rediscovered relationship with nature and the strongholds of long battles in the name of resistance to a world that, together with words, proceeds with the systematic elimination of things, or, to be more precise, living organisms deemed useless to the existing neoliberal and capitalist economic systems.

I borrow the term ‘uncultivated’ from La vita selvatica (Wild Life). Stories of humans and non-humans, by anthropologist Adriano Favole, a passionate examination of the current role of those extraordinary areas where the work and thinking of humans and non-humans not only do not conflict, but intertwine and harmonize, establishing new relationships between species that are very different from each other, forming natural reservoirs where life is constantly regenerating. Throughout the world, it is the profound intelligence and knowledge of nature on the part of native cultures that provide the most striking examples of this relationship. The ability of the “peoples of the uncultivated,” as Favole defines them, has led to the establishment of strict rules for the protection and respect of living organisms, the violation of which constitutes a true desecration of a dimension that does not belong to man and on which human beings still depend in every way: 'The peoples we call ‘traditional’ and often portray as bound to their ancestors and prohibitions should perhaps be defined as ‘peoples of the future’. Societies that look forward rather than backward. Lovers of their descendants rather than their ancestors,' writes Favole.

If, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the forest is the place where everything happens, in places without forests, without uncultivated land, or, according to Favole's definition, ‘spaces with a high density of life’, nothing can really happen anymore. It is against this future without change, where all forms of biodiversity are excluded, that numerous citizens' committees, such as La Goccia, are fighting throughout Italy to defend the plant heritage that is constantly in danger because it is threatened by the inexhaustible hunger for land that characterizes the political and economic choices in our country.

In 2022, the La Goccia Observatory, created with the aim of studying and applying new solutions in the area with the goal of restoring the natural forest to protect its biodiversity and enhance its ecosystem benefits, signed a collaboration agreement with the municipality that provides for ‘natural’ soil remediation processes (Nature Based Solutions, NBS) now studied and implemented in non-violent interventions, as well as only partial use of the area.

As Favole writes at the beginning of La vita selvatica (Wild Life): ‘The wild, the uncultivated, is not chaos: it is life that organizes itself, that sprouts, that stratifies like corals, that meets and collides, life that is continually reborn around that organization we call 'culture’. This book is an invitation to look outside ourselves.'

The Rusty One

There is a little-known Grimm fairy tale, The Rusty One (Der Eisenhans), which features the wild man (green man, wilderman), an ancient folk character found in folklore throughout Europe and other countries around the world, who embodies the power of nature in legends carved, painted, and written. The fairy tale opens with the story of a king's hunting reserve forest, from which no one ever returns. Following the mysterious disappearances, the place is deserted for many years until an intrepid hunter discovers that a monstrous creature lives in a deep pond, described as follows: “They found a wild man whose body was as dark as rusty iron and whose hair hung down over his face and reached his knees.” Captured and brought to the king, he is locked up in a cage.

One day, the king's young son's golden ball ended up in the cage: to get it back, the child stole the key hidden under his mother, the queen's, pillow and freed the Rusty One. Then the two flee together into the dark forest, the little boy perched on the man's shoulder, an image reminiscent of St. Christopher and the baby Jesus (according to legend, Christopher was a gruff and taciturn man who lived alone in the forest he owned).

In the forest of the Rusty One, the child is put in charge of guarding a spring as clear and limpid as crystal: his task is to ensure that it is not contaminated by any contact, a task that the little prince fails three times, forcing him to go out into the world and tempt fate. Before his departure, the Wild Man, who has become fond of him, becomes his magical helper and promises to protect him. Thanks to his spells, the prince manages to win a bloody war between two kingdoms and win a princess. At the end of the story, Rugginoso reveals himself to be a powerful king, master of formidable riches.

This fairy tale exemplifies the ambiguity with which nature is portrayed, on the one hand as a place of terror, wild and dark, and on the other as an inviolable reservoir of life and prodigious forces. But what is most interesting is that this hybridization between the two visions is embodied in the character of the Wild Man who, remaining faithful to his duties as guardian of wildness, ultimately reveals himself to be the lord of immeasurable riches.