The Municipality of Bologna accelerates on the recognition of the 42 kilometers of city porticoes as UNESCO World Heritage Site.
A technical working group will take care of the drafting of the dossier that in two years will bring the candidature to the final response of the International Council of Monuments and Sites of Paris (ICOMOS).
Since 2006, the porticos of Bologna have been included in the Italian tentative list of the candidate sites to become UNESCO world heritage sites. In recent years there has been a work of study and promotion of the project that involved the whole city and now the time is ripe to submit the application to the final evaluation stage.
In September 2019 a preliminary version of the dossier will be delivered to the Paris Council and from that moment the observation phase will begin. The final submission of the dossier is scheduled for February 2020. Then, in the autumn of the same year, the inspectors will be visited. Finally, in February 2021, the city will have the response of the evaluating commission.
The candidacies advanced by Italy are assessed with particular severity by ICOMOS and UNESCO. In fact, Italy is the country with the highest number of UNESCO sites in the world (54). The list is increasingly selective, to achieve a balance between European and non-European sites. Italy can therefore present only one application per year in Paris.
For this reason, among the 10 criteria for the inclusion of assets on the World Heritage list, the Municipality is working in particular on two:
show an important interchange of human values, over a long period of time or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture, technology, monumental arts, urban planning and landscape design;
be an extraordinary example of a building typology, of an architectural or technological set, or of a landscape, illustrating one or more important phases in human history.
At the same time we are also working on the definition of "Exceptional Universal Value". Among the exceptional values the pervasive presence of the arcades throughout the city, both in the historic center and in the suburbs, the secular legislation, the state of conservation and their daily use.
Still, the ancient architectural origins, starting from the ancient western civilizations (Greek and Roman), the portico has in fact constituted the place of shelter and decorum par excellence, made available for the whole community. Finally, the social aspect: from the Middle Ages to today the porticoes represent the place of integration par excellence, where the civil and religious spaces, the private homes, belonging to all walks of life, are perfectly integrated.
