Proceedings of the XVIII - IPSAPA Interdisciplinary Scientific Conference. Special Issue 1/2014. 11 THE USEFULNESS OF THE USELESS IN THE LANDSCAPE-CULTURAL MOSAIC Livio Clemente Piccinini President of IPSAPA, Udine Ting Fa Margherita Chang Università degli Studi di Udine Keywords: Landscape and cultural mosaic, useful and useless, hidden profit, value of cultural heritage, hedonism and eudaimonia This year's IPSAPA/ISPALEM conference urged attendees, as usual, to critically reflect on certain fundamental concepts for the analysis of the landscape-cultural mosaic, by encouraging on the one hand, methodological analysis, and on the other, their application in the field. The fundamental concepts for this year were the true, the beautiful, the good and their counterpoints (false, ugly, bad) viewed in their relationship with the two ambiguous parameters of useful and useless. The last two conferences were decidedly oriented towards the '"useless", as they were titled Wonderland and Utopia, while in this edition the orientation was directed towards the equilibrium between the two worlds of the useful and the useless (first volume), with the operative corollaries of biodiversity and of typicality, in a frame of liveability (second volume). It is not true - even in times of crisis - that only that which makes a profit is useful. There is, in mercantile democracies, knowledge, which is deemed to be "useless" that instead proves to be of an extraordinary utility. Among the premises of this conference we must remember the noted essay by Nuccio Ordine focused on the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful. Through the reflections of great philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Zhuang- zi, Pico della Mirandola, Montaigne, Bruno, Kant, Tocqueville, Newman, Heidegger) and of great writers (Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Cervantes, Lessing, Dickens, Gautiér, Kakuzo Okakura, Garcia Lorca, Garcia Màrquez, Ionesco, Calvino), Nuccio Ordine shows how the obsession with ownership and the cult of usefulness ends up sapping the spirit, endangering not only schools and universities, art and creativity, but also certain fundamental values such as dignitas hominis (human dignity), love, and truth. Abraham Flexner - in his fascinating essay translated into Italian for the first time - recalls that even the sciences teach us about the usefulness of the useless. By eliminating the gratuitous and unnecessary, by killing those luxuries deemed to be superfluous, homo sapiens can hardly make humanity more human. These conclusions may appear one-sided as the testimonies originate from thinkers and artists, but Flexner with the intuition of the Centre for Advanced Studies in