Una città con le radici saldamente poggiate nel futuro

Pescara grew up before even being a teenager, bypassing an entire phase of its life and, therefore, it has looked ahead to its future more attentively than looking back to its past.
What was ancient seemed old, the present has always been confining. Pescara has always maintained an ambiguous relationship with tradition: sometimes the city has considered it as a memory of the past, sometimes as an inheritance to get rid of. As a consequence of this, a myth of a rootless city has strengthened like that of a city whose roots are too scattered to make it acquire any importance and allow it to compete with other near or far away urban contexts that are proudly plunged into history. The two river shores of D’Annunzio’s Pescara barely preserve hints of its past: the star-shaped fortress that could have become its symbol, and unfortunately never will, vanished after Italy’s process of unification and Pescara focused on the 20th century that, for good or for worse, marked its foundation and growth.
World War II can be considered the watershed between what existed before and after, due to the American bombing that erased the liberty identity style of the garden city that had been unified and opened its doors to the overflowing and yet still messy development caused by the reconstruction boom that converted the city into a renowned economic and commercial centre of the entire region. Still looking for a partially uncertain vocation, Pescara enjoys being modern, free from the obsession of the cult of the past. Its soundtrack is futuristic, made of the rumble of plane engines, racing cars and of the first helicopter; its music is the most twentieth-century and foreign of all, jazz music, to which it dedicated the first Italian festival. Amidst the greenery of D’Annunzio’s hills and the green colours of the Adriatic Sea, Pescara narrates itself as free from the epic of Great History and with the light breath of a feuilleton of which a new chapter is yet to be written.