La città di John Ruskin. Dalla descrizione del paesaggio di Dio alla natura morale degli uomini

The text investigates the actuality of John Ruskin's thought and its expressive actuality about the topic of the city as a social product. Stimulated by some trace in the work of Ruskin, the paper finds a connection with some basic questions for the present planning practice, as: the relationship between built environment and natural environment articulated around the idea of architecture as interpretation of eternal laws and the idea of beauty as representation of harmonic structures; the questioning of rational behavior as driving force of human evolution and consequently the idea of the city as product of a coral work, as a needed precondition of collective happiness. The text deals with the parts of Ruskin's work usable in the present urban planning debate, building an unusual portrait of him, that we declare as not defined through bibliography or the exegesis of his writings, but built on the base of one of the possible (and fruitful for urban studies) interpretation of his legacies.