the beautiful nature of things
by
barbara nappini**
In 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote the following about the youth of the time:
Young people arrived, boys and girls together in camaraderie; and with them came a bit of noise and cheer. However, it was all very conventional, learned from television. As a matter of fact, some of them, while standing next to a small utilitarian car that was as shiny as a mirror, made the same poses as young people in advertisements for cars, clothes, or any kind of product. In their eyes one could see that type of total happiness which prohibited accessing any other feeling except for that one of conforming to a model that is loved and unquestioned. Nevertheless, since this type total happiness was obviously false and unnatural, in the depths of those eyes lingered a shadow of shame and fear. Their cheerful words were forced. Yet no one noticed. Hence, everyone’s part in the performance became perfect. (495)
The beauty celebrated in the following pages — revivifying for the spirit — lies at the opposite pole. That beauty which brings to us an authentic existence capable of giving depth to meaning that is expressed not merely as a sensation but as an experience. Beauty that arises from honest creative acts that, in their own turn, instigate further creative processes. Beauty that is infused in truth has both an individual, intimate dimension, and a collective one — a profound and spiritual connection with ecosystems and a deep understanding about and with life itself.
Aesthetic consciousness and the return of beauty
In the extractive society we live in, in times as cruel and violent as these, the spirit is forgotten in a lightless corner and abandoned to wither without ideals to aspire to, emptied of elevated and profound emotions, lacking a grounded value system to reference to, bereft of any idea that would make it worth it to lead a collective life passionately. It struggles to nourish itself through the basic reward mechanisms we would prefer it would habituate itself with — its hunger persists and creates a discontent that is continuous, inexplicable, and demoralizing.
Recognizing the beauty in our surroundings is nourishment — good, clean, and just for all beings. Let it enter our eyes and settle within us. Let it take root, germinate, let it inspire gratitude for “the beautiful nature of things”. This requires an act of will and courage because it demands we listen to the songs of the living that do not speak.
Amitav Ghosh explores how, in Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer skillfully intertwines many ways of relating to plants — both as objects of scientific investigation and as subjects of songs and stories. According to Ghosh, Kimmerer tells
the story of a scientist who goes into the rainforest with an Indigenous guide whose ability to identify countless plants accurately impresses him so much that he praises the guide’s knowledge: “Well, well, young man, I see you know the names of many of these plants.” The guide nods softly and replies, looking to the soil: “Yes, I’ve learned the names of every shrub — but I’ve yet to learn their songs. (107)
Ghosh continues:
Non-human beings can and must speak. As the threat of planetary catastrophe increases, it’s vital that the non-human voices reclaim their place in our stories. The fate of humans — and all our kin — depends on it. (107)
The fate of the human hinges on the capacity to hear the songs of those without words, to see and be grateful for the beauty surrounding us, to allow our spirits to be nourished by it and, through it, to exist. And to resist.
When articulated through the beauty that embraces collectivity, the resilience of the spirit becomes a palpable horizon where a nebulous aggregation of consumers is replaced by a multitude of activists, artisans, and builders. Beauty, then, by moving and stimulating the spirit, is a beauty which goes beyond being the expression of a creative act but rather becomes a powerful creative force in itself.
Beauty holds a tension and an opportunity for all of us to break free from the passive, enforced condition of compulsive consumers and to thus transform individual into collective experience — into political action and expression.
To assume a political dimension, the appreciation of beauty, and its ensuing experience in terms of its influence and spiritual dialogue, requires a collective framework. In this sense, the demand for “public” beauty shared as a communal good presupposes a deep awareness of both the collective and individual dimensions as a fundamental necessity of existence. Communities can and must demand shared beauty for towns and cities, for landscapes, workplaces, and recreational spaces.
In truth what one witnesses is a rather lack of demand for shared beauty, or even a certain conformity to the ugliness of public spaces — unless they function as expressions of power. In this case, what is not “private” is disqualified, neglected, left to decay due to a lack of attentive political stewardship over spaces that belong to everyone instead of no one.
But the state of care for the environments we live in — from the sidewalks we walk on and streetlights that guide us, the flowerbeds lining boulevards, to the spaces for sports, play, and gathering — are deeply reflexive of both respect for ourselves and for the communities we are a part of. The unseemliness of our places announces a verdict on our value, the value of our needs and choices, and the value of our place in the world.
Consequently, this shapes what we considered ourselves authorized to ask of or expect from those spaces. And places have — or rather, could have — a pedagogical potency to educate toward citizenship, democratic participation, and beauty. Consider, for example, the educational power that sacred art in places of worship had for centuries.
Filippo Tantillo addresses this in his book L’Italia vuota (Empty Italy). There, he narrates his journey through Italy’s inland regions from north to south and, in a passage I find particularly illuminating, observes how art — an expression of the spirit, intimate yet universalized beauty — has left the space of collective demand and consumption and has retreated into the private sphere.
[...] Cultural consumption is rapidly changing from enjoyment-usage — where management plays an irreplaceable role — to production. One can look for indications of this process in today’s expenditure habits which spend more on photography devices than cinema tickets and more on creative writing courses than books. A renewed public patronage must tackle the necessity to directly support artistic production itself and not merely its function in social reproduction. (...) For the public to reclaim its role as patron, we must rebuild a popular understanding of art’s value. (...) Like all revolutions, the project of national reconstruction needs a conscious aesthetic of its own (112-13).
Consciousness — including aesthetic consciousness — is the key to once again being truly present for ourselves in our own lives, choices, analyses of the world around us, and in the responses we are capable of offering. In the plenitude of a (also) spiritual life that is everyone’s prerogative, which does not necessarily mean adopting any religious faith or following any creed, it is imperative to attend to and cultivate the essential and potentially infinitely rich inner dimension — the dimension that gives depth to existence because it allows us the miracle of perceiving the uniqueness of our most intimate selves and our connection to others, to all living beings, to the cosmos.
As a matter of fact, a dialogue with the spirit marked by resoluteness, constantly practiced, and filled with awareness does not isolate us. Rather, it returns us to a profound sense of unity, to a humble fraternity, to an honest relationship with the all.
As stated in Principle I of The Earth Charter, “Respect and Care for the Community of Life”, in Article 4: “Secure Earth’s bounty and beauty for present and future generations”.
The future is in Earth’s beauty. To protect it is to declare our love for what is yet to come.
Transmission of beauty
In The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe writes:
Beauty is perfection with freedom (…) We call an animal beautiful when it gives us the idea that it can use its limbs at will; as soon as it actually uses them freely, the idea of beauty is swallowed up by sensations of grace, pleasure, lightness, pride, etc. As we see, beauty presupposes calm with strength, inactivity with power. (...) Thus I believe I may say: we call a perfectly organized being beautiful when its sight makes us think that it is granted, as soon as it wishes, a free and versatile use of all its limbs—which is why the highest sensation of beauty is tied to a sensation of trust and hope. (134)
To this day, the horse remains for me an eloquent testament to beauty: “a perfectly organized being [...] whose sight makes us think that it is granted, as soon as it wishes, a free and versatile use of all its limbs”. Although I am aware of how ineffable the concept itself might be, I have adopted this definition of beauty. Debated for centuries and expressed in radically opposing ways depending on geography, time, and socioeconomic conditions, that is, a concept ultimately shaped by the culture we are immersed in and which permeates every conception we hold.
David Hume’s Of the Standard of Taste, a treatise on aesthetic philosophy, defines beauty not as an object’s property but as a perceptual state of the subject beholding the object itself, perhaps best summarized in his famous phrase: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
Thus, we remain anchored to an idea of beauty that can take whichever form each of us assigns to it, with comprehensible, familiar, and shareable examples in this particular country, in these particular times — knitted by a common thread stitching together individual and collective experiences about natural spectacles which somehow speaks to all humanity: that simultaneous sensation of awe and spiritual connection before the sea, the sky, ancient trees, the desert, the rising and setting of the sun...
Beauty is necessary because there is an urgency for hope, and where beauty emerges, life flourishes. We have often talked about beauty in the context of the commons: food, water, air, soil, climate, fauna, and flora. By participating in the beauty of life, one experiences empathy and com(mon)-passion (suffering with, feeling together) — and a spiritual reunion with the all to which we belong.
This approach is embodied by food systems that are considered “alternative” but have sustained humans for millennia and shaped beauty as a collective experience for centuries. Models which embrace ecosystemic practices and fully speak to and with Nature’s complexity — an antithesis to the dominant reductionism of the 20th century.
Nevertheless, a question arises: how intertwined is beauty with modes of production? I think of where I live, Tuscany: as soon as I mention it, cypresses, rolling hills, olive groves, and vineyards are conjured but also hedgerows, farmhouses, tree-lined roads, and churches. An iconic landscape — harmonious and gentle, melancholic during winter’s damp fog, industrious under the summer’s light — is the result of centuries of human interaction with the environment. Human activities essential to community survival softened the hills, cleared stony fields, left wooded areas and hedges to mark boundaries, and planted cypresses like signposts along roads. Tuscany’s agricultural history has been fundamentally marked by the mezzadria system: an agrarian model with ancient roots, which flourished between the late 1800s and mid-1900s. During this time, most land was managed through contracts between landowners and tenant farmers (mezzadri), who worked the fields of the lord. An archaic form of labor which put the tenant farmer in a condition of near-total dependence.
Although Italy’s 1950 agrarian reform brought significant changes in land distribution, the landscape shaped by mezzadria persists in the trees bordering the fields: twin rows of vines together with field maples, but also mulberries, olives, willows (whose young branches were used for binding), and fruit trees. Small plots surrounded by ditches or terraces, drystone walls, and roadside shrines — all maintained for decades by the tireless, necessary labor of entire families and communities who inhabited these places. An innate connection born of daily, simple, direct familiarity and a culture of necessity symbolic of life in the country — a world where compulsive consumption was unknown and had no reason to exist.
(...)
In that rural society, protecting nature was instinctive, even as it was modified and domesticated in places. Nature was both an undeniable source of food for peoples and their survival, and a boundless, powerful force — capable of destroying months of human labor with a hailstorm, reducing entire regions to thirst and hunger through extended droughts, or sweeping villages away in landslides and floods. This relationship was marked by reverential fear and the awareness that nature could not be controlled and yet also fundamentally shaped by a respectful intimacy that produced beauty.
(...)
All that beauty was also an expression of biodiversity, rooted in the empirical understanding that diversity meant adaptability and a guarantee of survival; all that beauty was a vast genetic heritage but also a safeguard for soil fertility and a defense against erosion, with farmhouses placed in the most suitable spots and cared for by large, extended families; all that beauty was a hunting reserve in a world where coexistence with wildlife was unavoidable, and animals supplemented meager diets; all that beauty was also creation — an expression of the sacred in a society strongly permeated by Catholic values — where cultural and value unity could still be perceived. The landscape, the labor that shaped it, the beauty it radiates — acting directly on the human spirit. Opening it. Saving us.
Food, body, women, and freedom
The body is a physical and sacred manifestation of our existence and at the same time it is also “natural” one. The body unites all of us: the capacity to generate, grow, act, change, and regenerate; the fragility but also resilience; the ability to influence our brain and be influenced by it; the strength of storytelling. Because of all these powers, the body is a very attractive terrain for conquest.
Between 1400 and 1600, witch hunts were an “exercise” of domination: women accused of witchcraft were often midwives (levatrices) or pharmacists (alchemists) and, therefore, had a very strong connection with the body and extensive knowledge of nature and medicinal herbs, and were also capable of mastering poisons and psychotropic substances, hence revolutionary and dangerous (servants of Satan). Given this mysterious and powerful relationship with nature and the body, subjugating them became necessary, as became imperative to dominate their will and independence. Violently humiliating their bodies was the tool used to achieve this. That process, which destroyed what could not be dominated, what was different, with spectacular and atrocious executions that served as a warning to all, remains highly symbolic to this day.
In the 1960s, the body became a visible instrument for change: once again, in particular the bodies of women who publicly claimed the right to sexuality separate from procreation. The right to pleasure! During the same period, another struggle specific to women was that for divorce: an issue that particularly affected women, prisoners of a dynamic in which they had no decision-making power in the face of total male freedom and, above all, social approval of their husbands’ behavior. Luciana Castiglina, a militant member of the Italian Communist Party, founder of the newspaper Il Manifesto, member of parliament, MEP, writer, and journalist, recalls today: “people talked about love in the squares, during rallies. Love had become a right: it was a revolution”.
A cultural and political revolution in which the body was a decisive presence: politics without joy, without pleasure, without the body, is a domination of power for its own sake. Sad.
In this context, accustomed to not holding power, women played a fundamental role. They focused on developing a core body of knowledge that was an “alternative”, different, and diverse narrative capable of representing women’s stories that they themselves had never told before. In those years, many men accompanied this ‘revolution’. They too with their bodies, less oppressed, less obscure, less ‘rebellious’, as a political tool in the squares and in the marches.
Separating ourselves from nature and the body to establish an ‘intellectualized’ relationship with them is an exercise of power — as well as being a source of unspeakable suffering. Solely considering nature and the body as means of production leads us to measure them in terms of their efficiency, conformity and productivity. Animal husbandry is an example of this, as we have seen. Turning animals into food-producing machines denies their ethology and their being, manages their right to exist by controlling the ways in which they do so. Under this regime, our bodies are also required to perform and compete: the businesses of physical fitness, superfoods, and healthy foods have been built around the myth of a “competitive” body. But this is again an alienated response to an invented, prescribed need: spas, wellness centers, cosmetic surgery, gyms, high-protein food boutiques, and supplements are another way to generate profit, and to not take care of ourselves exactly.
In our society, the body must be controlled. It must not be listened to or looked at for how it expresses itself. This stance is a metaphor for control over nature and, therefore, over society and its power.
The body, like nature, is commodified, contaminated, and sold. The very body that by its very physiology is constantly changing, is instead prevented from evolving and aging and great efforts are made to crystallize it in its most efficient (i.e., productive) form, which generally corresponds to the first decades of our lives. As the efficiency of the body, i.e., its productivity, declines, this appears to be an unacceptable process. Hence the need to intervene at all costs to make it at least look like it is still performing. Or to hide it, censor it.
On the contrary, it is in the recovery of the natural forces that celebrate existence, in the sensual and aesthetic features that are unrelated to competition and inherent in creation, that an idea of joyful revolution and freedom is generated.
The freedom of human beings — of their bodies, their consciousness — is so frightening that the spirit of capitalism ridicules the idea of liberating nature and attempts to erase it by labelling it nostalgia or utopian idealism. However, a free society can base scientific concepts on an experience — including a physical one — of nature as a living complex that hosts us.
The link between the liberation of human bodies and the liberation of nature is also expressed in the importance that ecological consciousness has today in movements that strive for equity and social transformation. The violent intrusion of productive activities and their impactful consequences on ecosystems is inseparable from capitalism.
(...)
The body makes us feel hungry. It needs food to be a body, to grow, to stay warm, to think. In terms of nutrition, this is an animalistic, ancestral hunger that influences us more than any rational information, more than the most daring marketing campaign, more than common sense. Hunger bypasses cultural constructs and makes us beastly. And that’s a good thing.
We are also hungry for food to nourish our minds and hearts.
There are many different types of hunger: too often we rush to satisfy it without pausing to reflect, we rush to distract ourselves so as not to waste time, not to lose out.
However, there are also those who shy away from competition, from the frantic and aimless race, instead deciding to stop and listen to that hunger in its various forms. They move away from chaos, change course and pace, and pay attention to it, investigate it, take care of it: it is hunger for good, clean, and fair food. It is also hunger for knowledge, peace, colors, and beauty. Hunger for freedom.
(...)
It is true that Slow Food’s first successful slogan was “Defend the right to pleasure”. Our founder, Carlin Petrini, whom I consider a friend but above all a mentor, transformed pleasure into a right. A pleasure created by the senses, and hence by the body. By this I do not exclusively mean from a hedonistic point of view, which is part of Slow Food’s DNA, but above all in opposition to functionality, efficiency, and productivity. In a revolutionary way! The connection with pleasure that is forged in the physical dimension of our corporeality is a prerogative for every being, and time, energy, and conscious attention are devoted to it, even though it is not, in itself, productive in industrial terms. Or perhaps, precisely because it is not productive, it is an inalienable right. And pursuing it is joyfully revolutionary!
(...)
By reclaiming the freedom of the body through consciousness-filled pleasure, a revolution begins that puts food at the center.
So today, the logic that guides the food production, distribution, and consumption system must be fully “organic” (“bio”): organic (bio) in its broadest sense, which goes beyond farming practices and certifications and rather refers to its original meaning, that is, centered on life, for life.
Living a gentle existence that reminds us that we are a humble part of nature can make us happy. This does not imply chagrin or condescension, but rather a life lived with the relief that comes from putting things into perspective, from re-evaluating.
Entering into the dynamic of support, solidarity, listening, and the richness of diversity could be a step towards equality and fairness.
To determine the body — including through food that nourishes without impoverishing or exploiting — and taking care of our own consciousness — including through caring for others — helps to rearrange and recompose the fragments of our fractured existential dimension.
The body is beautiful by definition simply because it exists and allows us to be and to do, to feel pleasure and to create things. The body allows us to live in nature, consciousness allows us to perceive it and see its beauty.
To see beauty.
Works Cited
Ghosh, Amitav. La maledizione della noce moscata. Parabole per un pianeta in crisi. Neri Pozza, 2021.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. La metamorfosi delle piante. Edited by Stefano Zecchi, Guanda, 1983.
Hume, David. Della regola del gusto. Edited by Gianni Paganini, Bompiani, 2009.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Petrolio. Einaudi, 1992.
Tantillo, Filippo. L’Italia vuota. Donzelli, 2020
QUOTE AS:
Barbara Nappini. The Beautiful Nature of Things. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.3, September 2025. p. 203-215
** This is an edited excerpt of Barbara Nappini’s La Natura Bella Delle Cose. Find the full book here.
