Consonno, Italy - Almost a Fairy Tale
but, alas, no. ~ A six-minute ESSAY on delusion and greed from the 🌿Leaves archive
Today, something unusual for 🌿Leaves - an essay. You’ll rarely see one here. I used to write non-fiction for the world of academia, but now mostly prefer to dabble in adventures and lies. Especially lies.
This TRUE story , brought back from the archives of early 2023, has no gallant hero who comes riding up on a white horse to save the day. It is almost a fairy tale, but not quite.
Once upon a time in Lombardy, in the hills of Brianza, north of Milan, there was a small farming village called Consonno, in which lived about three-hundred people. Generations of the same families had lived and worked there for more than five centuries
The village was no more than a scattering of small houses built around a little medieval church, and was entirely surrounded by forest. There was a town square, a tavern, a shop, and one municipal building. The ancient church had a tall bell tower and an interior decorated with religious paintings.
The farmers of Consonno made a living by harvesting chestnuts in the surrounding forests and by growing leeks and celery. Their lives were not meager; they had every thing they needed to thrive – family, shelter, food, work and stability. They did not own their homes or the land they cultivated; the village and the acres of arable land had long been the property of the wealthy Brianza family.
Consonno, in its forest nest, was high in the hills, with long views over small towns in the valley below, a river and two lakes. A mule track was the only way in, and the farmers delivered their harvests to a small market town down the mountain, by pulling a large sledge. Life had changed very little in the area since the 1500s.
In modern times, Consonno was sold to a wealthy Count, a man with big dreams and enough money to make them come true. He had a rather grand, though some would say, misguided vision for this beautiful natural area, with its superb panoramic position, and its nearness to the large metropolis of Milan: He wanted to build here a magnificent Città dei Balocchi — a City of Playthings … so he bought the entire village and all its farm land.
The Count first built a road suitable for motor traffic to replace the ancient mule track. He promised the village inhabitants that he intended only to increase tourism in the area by building a hotel, and would leave the old village intact. As one might have predicted, however, it was not true. He immediately had all the little houses and buildings pulled down, saving only the small church and its rectory.
As the bulldozers and trucks arrived, the villagers were forced to abandon their homes. The machines attacked the ancient houses, they said, with the inhabitants still inside and the animals still in the stables.
The people, whose ancestors had lived in Consonno for generations, were suddenly forced to find other housing for their families and to find work, for the most part, in industries in the small towns in the valley.
In place of the small rustic village, an ever-expanding modern complex quickly arose. The Count’ set about transforming Consonno into “The Las Vegas of Brianza”. Without a care, he leveled large areas of the mountain with explosives to widen the view, providing vistas of the Alps to the north. He constructed a restaurant, a dance hall, a luxury hotel, a casino, a pagoda, a minaret, a mock medieval castle gateway, and a miniature railway to tour the resort complex. He had even more grandiose plans for further expansion — basketball courts, tennis courts, miniature golf, a zoo, and an automobile racing circuit.
The popularity and acclaim of the City of Playthings reached its peak from 1968 to 1976. Thousands of tourists visited. It became a favored destination for Italian newlyweds. World class entertainers performed every night.
However, its popularity was not to last. It’s failure began as a result of continuous protests - mass demonstrations of on-going outrage about the environmental damage that was being done there, the ruination of the natural landscape, the construction of buildings that were incongruous with the rural landscape.
Then, in 1977, a death knell sounded. Unusually heavy, extensive rains over the badly damaged landscape caused devastating landslides. In a fine example of Nature’s fury, these huge landslides damaged some of the buildings and blocked the only road into The City of Playthings. The Count’s attempts to clear the debris proved largely fruitless, and his dream city entered a terminal decline.
Though the Count tried to restore the road and had plans drawn up to embark on re-construction, those plans were not realized, and all the buildings fell into disrepair. The entire complex was fenced off for safety reasons, and continual unrestrained bouts of vandalism and graffiti defacement cause further damage to the site. Now, over thirty years later, there are still no plans to restore La Città dei Balocchi , nor to restore the village that had been there previously.
In a fairy tale, a handsome prince on a white steed would now enter and proclaim that the ruins of the ill-fated and, arguably, ill-conceived City of Playthings would be erased forever and the village restored. The previous residents could miraculously return to their ancient ground and live happily ever after, gathering chestnuts and growing celery and leeks in their ancestral home. But that has not happened. The ruins live on as a monument to a human tendency toward greed, a lack of respect for the environment, and indifference to the lives of politically powerless people. It has, so far, proven to be too much to overcome.
This sort of thing is not uncommon, of course, and it is not new. You can point to many examples closer to home, past and present, of greed, destruction of the natural environment and indifference to the needs or rights of others. In our own town, our state and our country, environmental and social concerns nearly always take a back seat to the incessant drive for wealth and power. It is often carried out in the name of commerce and progress.
I like to think of those rainstorms and landslides, though. Who is it that wields the final power? I am betting on Mother Nature. How about you?
What a sad tale.... with just dessert for the Count. How many more of these stories are playing out today? Thank you for ringing the bell.
I have been to Italy 5 times and my heart broke for the villagers forced to leave their homes.