According to the Official List of Protected Natural Areas (Elenco ufficiale delle aree protette, EUAP), Italy is home to 25 national parks, one of which, in Sardinia, was institutionally established in 1998 but is not yet operative. These parks constitute around 5.3 per cent of the national territory, ranging from the tiny Cinque Terre National Park (only 4,300 acres) to the largest of all, the Pollino National Park, which comprises slightly over 47 million acres. Yet none of them is more famous than the Gran Paradiso National Park, named for the eponymous mountain and established in 1922 to preserve and protect 173,000 acres of Alpine terrain between the regions of Val d'Aosta and Piedmont. Celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year, the Gran Paradiso National Park owes most of its fame to its most iconic animal inhabitant, the Alpine ibex (Capra ibex), whose profile is emblazoned on the park's logo and whose battle for survival prompted the park's very creation.
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg's volume, A Monastery for the Ibex: Conservation, State, and Conflict on the Gran Paradiso, 1919–1949, tracks the historical origins of the Gran Paradiso National Park and reconstructs how it was both instrumental in preventing the extinction of the Alpine ibex and the centre of a battle among different social, cultural, and political forces. The book follows a roughly chronological trajectory, leading readers from the motives behind the initial donation made by King Victor Emmanuel III of his royal hunting reserve to the Italian state in order to establish the first national park, to the turbulent years of the Resistance and the transition to the new Italian Republic after the Second World War. However, the book's focus lies mostly on the Fascist management of the park and how Fascism politicised the ibex and nature preservation for its own material and symbolic purposes. As pointed out in the introductory chapter (‘A Paradise Reclaimed’), one of the main goals of this volume is to examine ‘from a material angle, anchored to the day-to-day activities of the state and its agency, how the immanent idea fascism had of the state translated into environmental politics’ (p. 11). In doing so, though, it also highlights both ‘overlooked’ historical continuities with pre- and post-Fascist Italy, and, perhaps even most importantly, the claim that conflict about access to the park's resources ‘allowed, even in Fascist Italy, for spaces of social dialectics and the expression of interests that antagonized the policy decision of a wannabe totalitarian state’ (pp. 10, 13).
A Monastery for the Ibex is composed of an introduction, followed by six chapters and a short epilogue. Each chapter, as well as the introductory and concluding remarks, has a title that plays ironically with the idea of ‘paradise’ embedded in the name of the national park: from ‘The Devil's Paradise’ of chapter one to ‘Resistant Paradise’, the epilogue, we learn how the park was not in fact a separate sphere (as etymologically suggested by the term ‘paradise’) but a place in which different local and national agents, as well as political, ecological, and scientific aspirations, engaged in conflicts that were both within and beyond the allegedly conservationist goal of the park. That goal, however, was ultimately and somehow surprisingly achieved: even though von Hardenberg states that the decision to preserve the ibex ‘was driven by the desire of some members of urban and educated elites’ against the will of the local population, since ‘a veritable “monastery for the ibex” … would have been impracticable in an area with such a significant human presence’, he also acknowledges that ‘all the present-day ibex herds in the Alps come from the stock originally preserved by the Italian royal house’ (pp. 69, 32).
Graf von Hardenberg is an environmental historian who has published extensively on the environmental politics of Fascism, the notion of ‘nature state’, and the history of environmental conservation. It is thus unsurprising that A Monastery for the Ibex – the first volume in English that reconstructs in detail the history of an Italian national park – is extremely well-researched and accessible. It allows even non-specialists to retrace the Italian Fascist regime's stance on nature conservation as it shifted from initial lack of interest to enthusiastic appropriation, depicting itself as the saviour of Italy's natural environment (p. 34). From there the regime adopted a colonial attitude toward these state-protected environments, whereby production of material and/or symbolic capital – and not the promotion of scientific research – was the central aim of conservation efforts (pp. 106–118). Yet, one of the most interesting aspects of this compelling work lies in its ability to display how the park has also been the stage for a clash between local and national stakeholders, a clash that did not end with the Fascist era but continues into the present-day Italian Republic (p. 158). Indeed, such conflicts surrounding environmental conservation efforts are bound to occur where local traditions and practices come up against global interests and influences. From this perspective, A Monastery for the Ibex is not only a convincing reconstruction of a specific portion of Italian environmental history but also a very much welcomed contribution, from an Italian perspective, to the contemporary larger debate on the entanglement of cultural, political, and ecological issues.
