L'eredità di John Ruskin 'critico della società'

The present reflection aims to investigate the critical Ruskin of society, making a comparison between two historical moments of the time in which it acts and the contemporary era, both phases of transition. Today Ruskin's thought expresses an extraordinary modernity for the new concept of heritage as a common good, just as art according to the scholar was for everyone because for all it was necessary; for the resumption of a craftsmanship compared to the standardization of the processes, characterizing the twentieth century, against which Ruskin has always fought. The action of the civil war of which the work of Ruskin and the SPAB was first-born and brilliant testimony seems today, after a certain stasis, to have taken a breath in the quantity of initiatives undertaken by associations and committees in defense of one or the another monument. The danger of politicizable populism, which could lurk in this hypertrophied activism, can find in the disciplinary firmness of the restoration, now established, but that professes the ethics of Ruskin, a guide for a new way of understanding interventions on preexistences.