The European Landscape Convention and the Case of Italy after Twenty Years

Geographers have long debated on the topic of landscape, confronting the ideas of other disciplines and policymakers, always contributing to a positive discussion even for juridical purposes, but never forgetting the necessity to behold critically. The term landscape possesses a double meaning (the thing and its representation), indeed suggesting the considerable complexity of the topic. The real intrinsic risk of the 2000 European Landscape Convention is the demand of transforming what has an unavoidable perceptive-aesthetic nature (landscape), in an object that has a political status (territory). But the difference between the political and the aesthetic is crucial and threatens to undermine the very possibility of the existence of landscape policies. Policies do operate by stating rules and norms, all contained in written laws. On the contrary, the aesthetic field is not reducible, by nature, to any rule or norm, except in the case of dictatorial regimes. In Italy, the actual risk appears to be the latest occasion to produce as many landscape policies as the number of Regions, namely twenty.