The eagle suffers little birds to sing, and is not careful what they mean thereby," Shakespeare wrote. After a 400-year pause for reflection, we now know what he meant. The "lone eagles" of the information revolution let the chattering classes of the newsgroups spam their fill out there in the lower reaches of cyberspace, while they - the hovering elite - seek out their prey from on high. It's all there in Titus Andronicus IV.iv.82 (according to gopher://ccat.sas.upenn.edu).
Lone eagles are those professionals whose business is so virtual, or whose position within the organisation is so unassailable, that they are able to live anywhere. Lone eagles have no ties - but they do need a base. They need a sense of place, without the distractions that real communities so often bring with them. History, without the payback. What could be better, then, than an abandoned village in the hills?
There are plenty of these on offer in Italy - though you need to be eagle-eyed to spot them. Nature doesn't take long to reclaim its own, and crumbling walls draped in ivy have a tendency to blend in with their surroundings.
Colletta di Castelbianco, a few kilometres inland from the rugged Ligurian coast near Genoa, is such a place. It was rocked by an earthquake in 1887, but it was natural selection, rather than natural disaster, that finally did for Colletta. Some time after the last war, the remaining inhabitants finally admitted that this had been a lousy place to build a village and headed off to Marseille, where a small group of them still live.
Perched high above the Pennavaira torrent, Colletta could support only a tiny agricultural community from the terraced smallholdings that stepped down into the valley floor. When the village was founded in the 14th century, about the only thing it had going for it was what it had going against it: it was in the middle of nowhere. The Saracens were unlikely to penetrate this far inland and, even if they did, why go to the bother of raping, sacking and pillaging a pimple on the landscape?
Finally though, at the butt-end of the century which seemed to have condemned it, the village has been granted a last-minute reprieve. The middle of nowhere is back from beyond and back in fashion. Colletta di Castelbianco is being turned into Europe's first purpose-built Internet Village.
Lone eagles need eyries. So gambling on the eyrie futures market, a young, go-ahead construction agency called SIVIM, based in the northern Italian town of Alessandria (hometown of Umberto Eco, himself a restorer of things medieval) chased up the heirs of the village's last inhabitants. They didn't need much persuading to sell what they hardly realised they owned, and SIVIM clinched the deal for three billion lire - just over £1 million.
Colletta's tumbledown houses are being restored by architect Giancarlo De Carlo to provide around 60 self-contained living units. Most will have a minimum layout of living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom - all any self-respecting lone eagle needs. De Carlo is a believer in what he calls "non-violent architecture". He is aiming to reconstruct the village "without altering the genetic code which regulated its growth in the past". The whole project should be completed by 1999, although the first nine apartments have already been sold straight from the drawing-board.
So far, so what? A village of second homes, minus the distraction of local inhabitants with their muddy tractors and rowdy kids buzzing about on Vespas? It's been done before: a few years back, a whole Tuscan village was converted into a luxury timeshare hotel. What is different about Colletta - and what SIVIM is plugging as its number one selling-point - are the wires.
Telecom Italia has agreed to lay on fibre-optic ISDN cables straight away, making Colletta one of the few rural areas in Italy to be linked up to the network before the end of the century. What this means in practice is that each line will carry two 64K channels, allowing the subscriber to download a file while talking on the phone. ISDN also opens up user-access to high-speed Group 4 fax machines, digital phones and video-phones. And in addition, Colletta will have its own Internet server, connected to the village's local network by radio. Small transceivers attached to each PC will allow Colletta's happy tappers to drift from room to room or outside on to the flower-strewn terrace as the mood takes them.
But wait: there's more. Colletta's two cafés will be wired, Cyberia-style, so residents don't miss that vital e-mail message while they're out getting their cappuccino fix. Teleconferencing and "interactive art performances" are also promised. Walking into an Italian village bar has always been the classic "a hush fell over the saloon bar as McBride swung open the doors" kind of experience. The sceptics might argue that it won't be all that different in Colletta: instead of hostile stares from red-faced peasants playing cards and drinking paint-stripper wine you'll get hostile stares from brokers playing Myst in between deals and drinking dry Martinis.
But in a country where the infobahn is still a novelty and nobody has started worrying about roadworks or queues at the tollbooths, sceptics are thin on the ground. Paolo Ceccarelli, head of the archi-tecture faculty at Ferrara University, is one of the courageous few. At a conference organised for the launch of the Colletta project in November last year, he played the critic, presenting a paper entitled "Two PCs, the Osborne Internet Yellow Pages, a subscription to Wired and a mud hut."
"First," asks Ceccarelli, "what is the point of building a whole village around a communications device - the modem - which by its very nature allows you to be anywhere in the world? Can you imagine hundreds of people all going to the same village to make their phone calls?"
And, as he also points out, the village may be founded on a culturally alien concept. "The myth of the 'lone' eagle has some relevance in a country like the United States, where the frontiersman instinct has never really died - but it certainly doesn't apply to Italy, where most people don't even leave their mothers."
Ceccarelli says his worst nightmare is "the thought of so many telecommuters arriving from distant points, parking their BMWs out of sight of the village, climbing the stairs to their little monastic cells and plugging in their portables all at the same time, all oblivious to each other's presence. Here they start to tap away, making contact with other neurotics all over the world: it's a scenario which conjures up the great sanatoriums of the last century."
Giancarlo De Carlo, the architect responsible for the conversion of Colletta, isn't too worried about the village's future occupants. "Obviously, the reasons why Colletta was abandoned haven't gone away," he says. "So the new tenants will be different from the old ones: single people or families who are looking for a lifestyle which is online and comfortable at the same time."
What really excites De Carlo, though, is the medieval village as metaphor. He enthuses about Colletta's "crustacean" growth pattern: "the various living units have no fixed boundaries - you can imagine them expanding or contracting according to the needs of their users." This contrasts with what De Carlo refers to as the "vertebrate systems of contemporary architecture" - too rigid and sclerotic to adapt themselves easily to the new lightweight, hit-and-run needs of the global village. "Working on Colletta, I discovered something I had always suspected: the ancient stone-working techniques used to build these houses, with their very precise rules based on the nature of the materials, are perfectly adapted to support lightweight, advanced technology." In other words, it's easier to wire up the stone walls of the Middle Ages than the reinforced concrete of the technological 20th century.
Sounds fine and zippie. A quick Net surf, roast ox for tea and then out for a spot of jousting. Colletta, though, is a commercial proposition. De Carlo's vision of a crustacean organism made up of a number of cells which expand and dilate according to the needs of the community is unlikely ever to be realised: for obvious market reasons, the architect himself has been forced to divide up the cells into saleable units. So is Colletta just a holiday village with bells on?
From a quick survey of the first customers, the answer would seem to be yes. So far, those buying into the project include: a wine baron, a packaging king, a dealer in precious stones, a broker and a financial journalist. Each will have paid four million lire (around £1500) per square metre for their neo-monastic cells, bringing the price of a typical small unit to £100,000 - you'd pay the same price for a similar-sized apartment in central Rome or Milan.
The privately developed, top-down nature of the Colletta project makes it an unusual model among virtual communities. Ongoing experiments in the States are all based on pre-existing social infrastructures. The InfoZone, set up in 1993 by Richard Lowenberg in the small but chic mountain resort of Telluride, Colorado, is one of the most successful to date. The Telluride home page wears its community-serving heart on its sleeve: "The InfoZone ... is not merely the latest technical fix imposed upon our social landscape; it is a vital part of intelligently considered community planning ... that, by example, hopes to promote 'an ecology of the information society'."
Despite Lowenberg's commitment to the bottom-up approach, he takes a tolerantly ecumenical view of the future. "There are going to be many versions of telecom-munity development as the information society evolves." He is no optimist, though: such a barrage of differently angled shots is necessary, he believes, because it is going to be so difficult to hit the target. "The world's existing political, economic and social systems are compromising the possibilities of our collectively tele-mediated future. It will not be utopian. It will be just the opposite in many places around the world." Tolerance is the key, he says: "Differences will be accentuated, so respect for difference will be critical."
A more recent experiment, launched in the town of Blacksburg, Virginia, went for a more hard-sell approach in order to persuade the entire local community to come in on the network set up by the town's university, Virginia Tech, in collaboration with Bell Atlantic. But after a year, no more than one in three households are connected. In theory, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker and the local pizza parlour should all be hawking for business on the Net. In practice, says project co-ordinator Andrew Cohill, "what I call the reverse Field of Dreams theory applies. If you build it, they won't come. I've learned that it's not enough to provide the connectivity - you have to teach people its value. You have to show them it will mean something in their lives."
Another fundamental difference, however, concerns politics. For all their limitations, most virtual villages aspire to be local network democracies. Colletta, on the other hand, looks like a perfect example of a local network autocracy - complete with servant underclass. A local farmer has already offered his services as official procaccia to the village's new tenants. In rural Italy, the procaccia was a messenger and delivery man, a kind of medieval steward whose job it was to run messages, bring in the post and procure anything the inhabitants wanted. The Net lords of Colletta will send him off to the big city to buy all those things that The Middle of Nowhere so conspicuously lacks: condoms, Veuve Cliquot champagne, copies of Wired, digital tapes... A virtual serf for the virtual aristocrats.
Needless to say, harsh realities - virtual and otherwise - will be kept at bay. Indeed, the new village will be as impenetrable as the old one. As the PR brochure put out by SIVIM reassures potential buyers: "The cybernetic nervous system grafted onto the ancient structure of the village ... apart from acting as a gateway to the information superhighway, will constitute a protective barrier designed to filter incoming information, in order to protect the peace of mind of the inhabitants." Now that you've met the serf you can admire the battlements.
Some would say that such a fortress is an honest reflection of the essential elitism behind the whole "lone eagle" myth - but it's a peculiarly Italian one, in that Colletta's eagles are looking for safety in numbers. "You can't smell your next-door neighbour in the global village, and that's a big drawback in this country, where people thrive on physical proximity," comments Sere na Vicari of the University of Pavia, who has been studying the telework phenomenon for the last three years. Like Ceccarelli, she believes that lone eagles are an American import that will not adapt well to European soil. "The technological limits are breaking down much faster than the social limits," she says.
Colletta is an example of what Richard Lowenberg calls a "community of desire" - those rural idylls which the footloose nature of life in the global village have suddenly put within our reach - at least in theory. But, on the other hand, Paolo Ceccarelli is scathing about what he refers to as "the myth of the rural utopia full of aspiring Thoreaus clicking away on their mice in charming little cottages immersed in the verdant wood."
Which is not to say that the revolution needs to be either urban or centralised. "Modern communications allow us to requalify and relaunch provincial centres which have extraordinary human resources and traditions, places which still have a lot to teach us," Ceccarelli adds. "Phones, faxes and motorways have already played a significant part in halting the drain to the cities and giving previously marginal areas - like the east coast of Italy - an important boost. The modem-and-computer wave will only take this process further."
Colletta's inhabitants relaunched themselves decades ago, by getting out. Requalifying and reviving a long-dead Italian village by rerouting some ISDN cables may provide some new opportunities for the heritage industry, but whether it will alter the future of society as we know it is yet to be seen.
Lee Marshall (l.marshall@agora.stm.it) is a freelance writer based in Rome. He's more a sociable coot than a lone eagle.