Leonardo Sciascia. The man and the writer

and museums of peasant culture. Rural farmhouses shifted “from sites of backbreaking labor to exclusive places of leisure and relaxation” (197) and “intentional monuments to endangered memory” (196). Chapter 6 examines “the intellectual and legislative debates on landscape at the national, regional and local levels” (240). It describes the normative construction of beautiful landscapes in Chianti and the Orcia Valley, which became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. Yet at the same time the Valley’s beauty and heritage were threatened by sordid scandals surrounding housing developments, demonstrating the oppositional forces affecting the uses and meanings of the land. Gaggio concludes that, “the Tuscan rural landscape has told many contradictory stories in the past century” (281). He lays out those stories in a compelling narrative that demonstrates how landscape is shaped by humans’ complex interactions with the places they inhabit. The book will interest social science students and scholars of Tuscany and Italy, and those concerned with human-land interactions, the culture of agriculture, and the grassroots enactment of politics. The book leaves us with interesting questions such as, “What makes a landscape beautiful and thus worth protecting?” (238). What makes a landscape “legible”? How do landscapes represent tradition and modernity? How does landscape dovetail with efforts for sustainability? Gaggio adduces abundant empirical data from a wide array of sources to address these and other questions and shows the power of landscape as a conceptual and material focus.