Who’s saving what?

Unlisted Con­fer­ence Rome, Italy April 15–16, 2011 (AIRC-MiBAC)

In Rome we con­front the past on a daily basis.  And I’m not just talk­ing about the obvi­ous– the Colos­seum, Forum, Cir­cus Max­imus.  We also fre­quently see a strip of Roman pave­ment sec­tioned off from traf­fic, a chunk of wall stick­ing out of a more mod­ern struc­ture, a stack of tuff blocks. His­tory is every­where; and it’s crum­bling before our eyes.  Just have a look at the fire wall from the Forum of Augus­tus or the Ser­vian Wall sec­tion on the Aventine.

Rome is one of sev­eral UNESCO her­itage sites in Italy.  The world her­itage list, which also includes national parks, rec­og­nizes and high­lights the extra­or­di­nary achieve­ments of civ­i­liza­tions past, as well as extra­or­di­nary nat­ural settings.

Look closely at the list; a huge per­cent­age of sites are, in fact, archae­o­log­i­cal in char­ac­ter.  Despite this mas­sive list, only a frac­tion of the world’s her­itage actu­ally is rep­re­sented.  The bulk of the world’s sites are not listed or attended to by the UNESCO list (and respec­tive coun­tries), or cov­ered by the valiant efforts of great world class orga­ni­za­tions such as ICCROM, Getty Con­ser­va­tion, WMF, GHF.  There’s just too much his­tory to pre­serve, and to make these top 10 lists, only the most unique or most exem­plary ones make it (and get the funding).

Given the cur­rent finan­cial state of things in the world, fund­ing of cul­tural her­itage and its preser­va­tion has been fur­ther exac­er­bated.  When we face finan­cial real­i­ties and rec­og­nize the needs that count­less mon­u­ments have in order to attain sus­tain­able preser­va­tion (through prop­erly con­ceived man­age­ment plans), what will be the future for the count­less of un-recognized or under-funded mon­u­ments and sites?

The pur­pose of the two day FIRST ANNUAL UNLISTED CONFERENCE is to address these defi­cien­cies through bring­ing together a var­ied group of “stake­hold­ers”, includ­ing archae­ol­o­gists, con­ser­va­tors, archi­tects, entre­pre­neurs, econ­o­mists, cin­e­matog­ra­phers, and those in social media for a new con­ver­sa­tion on con­ser­va­tion matters.

We’ll be post­ing the lec­tures after­ward on our new, revamped web­site (www.romanculture.org).  If you are in Rome April 15 and 16th, please have a look at the con­fer­ence pro­gram and con­sider stop­ping by to par­tic­i­pate in the conversation.

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