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

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY Corinto G.L. Department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism, University of Macerata, Piazzale L. Bertelli 1, 62100, Macerata, Italy. Email: gianluigi.corinto@unimc.it DOI: 10.14673/IJA2021121068 Key words: 2000 Florence Convention, Aesthetics, Politics, Geography. Vol. 36 - n. 1-2 (1-11) - 2021 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. There are many unclear sights, as for example a landscape on a misty day, but then we always say that no real landscape is in itself unclear. It is so only for us. The object, psychologists would assert, is never ambiguous, but becomes so only through our inattention. (Merleau-Ponty, p. 7) Landscape is that with which we see. (Wylie, 2007, p. 215) Introduction: Landscape is... For geographers, landscape is a central topic in the discipline organization and an interpretive model of the real, a tool for understanding the world. Over time, the theme behaves with a variable consideration among international academic studies. As yet, it does not diminish its relevance, overcoming paradigms and ephemeral fashions, because its study constantly helps researchers in facing complex issues. Mainly, treating landscape as a scientific issue, scholars can kindle their attention on the nature-culture relationship and subject-object observation (Wylie, 2007). In 2000, the European Convention of Landscape considered for the first time the landscape as a political object, even if the document was a mere declaration of intents delegating any successive normative policy to States and regional bodies 2 CORINTO (Council of Europe, 2000). A normative public intervention requires the quantitative measurement of things, including the most complex human phenomena, and a Landscape Policy necessarily will reify something immaterial—the landscape— which has also an unavoidable nature of a way of seeing (Farinelli, 1991; 2015). This paper aims at illustrating the difficulties to reduce an intrinsically aesthetic item in a political object. The politics of landscape risk the reification of it, making impossible an actual understanding of the complexity of the issue, often confusing the concept of environment and territory with that of the landscape. Geographers have long debated on the topic, 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 paper focuses on Italy as a case, mainly because Italy is the first State that considered the landscape in the fundamental principles of its Constitutional Law since 1948 (Predieri, 1969). The rest of the text is divided into three sections. The following one treats the landscape as a medium of meanings, as in the cultural geography approach. The third section is dedicated to the main figures of the Italian Landscape Policy from 1940 to the present time. The last section critically deals with the difficult/impossible reduction of an aesthetic issue, the landscape, to a political object, the territory. Landscape as a Medium The term landscape possesses a double meaning (the thing and its representation), indeed suggesting the considerable complexity of the topic. This fact becomes tangible even when one tries to approach the use of “landscape” in English and Italian, here taken as exemplary languages of Latin and Anglophone cultural traditions. Paesaggio is the Italian word for landscape, and the perceived meaning is the same for different mother-tongue individuals. However, the two words have very dissimilar etymologies that allow thinking to completely distinct cultural roots and thus to different conceptual orderings. Both the terms have made large geographical tours and complex historic itineraries. They have been used before in the aestheticartistic realm and then carried in the scientific arena by the geographer Alexander von Humboldt (Di Bartolo, 2013; Farinelli, 1991; Wulf, 2015). Some notes on etymology are addressed as follows. Paesaggio derives from Latin pagensis, an adjective of pagus, meaning both boundary stone and village and referring to the part of the natural environment colonized by a settling human community that considers it under its control. The verb is pango, which has several meanings: to plant, to flounder, to establish boundaries, to sign a contract, to write, to promise marriage. From Latin one can go back to Greek and find πήγνυμι (pegnymi) meaning to institute, to fix, to gather, to tie. THE EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE CONVENTION AND THE CASE OF ITALY AFTER TWENTY YEARS 3 The English term landscape has a more complex etymology and the story of the word is much more debated. The English language has imported landscape from Dutch during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Schama, 1995), progressively indicating both the visual appearance of the territory and a painting that represents the countryside by using the pictorial technique of perspective. The double nature of the term is confirmed by the definition of modern dictionaries of landscape: “(1) a picture of natural inland scenery; “(2) a portion of land that can be seen in one glace.” (Merrian Webster Dictionary, 1995, p. 292). In both cases, the idea of landscape descends from the human sense of sight, from the eye as a sensitive-perceptive human organ. Someway divergent and quite useful is the opinion of eminent scholar Kenneth Olwig (1996), who noted the old Dutch word landskab and the German landschäft—meaning in contemporary German language both landscape and countryside—designate the legal and administrative notion of community, region, and jurisdiction. It may be that the two meanings attributable to landscape/landschäft have coexisted or contrasted, at least until in Italy the aristocracy of the sixteenth century adopted the term to indicate a painting that represents a rural view (Cosgrove, 1985). All in sum, landscape means a customary territorial administrative unity. This meaning was already present in old English, German, Norse, and Danish languages (Hoad, 1996; Wedgwood, 1872). Yet, the German term explicitly refers to a community, a human group that is active in the area where it insists and lives (Turri, 2003). This concept is useful to join the German suffix -schäft and the English -scape, both meaning pole, stick, plant stem, descending from Latin scapus and Greek σκαπος (skapos), from which it derives σκῆπτρον (skeptron) scepter, the symbol of power and jurisdiction. Therefore, one can consider that the Latins, Greeks, and Anglo-Saxons properly used terms with diverse linguistic roots to indicate the action of signalizing the boundaries of their territory by planting in the ground stones and poles. It is possible to find some nuances of meaning. Yet, the word paesaggio reminds the idea of a built and inhabited area, the concept of making a village, giving sense to a place by residence, and culturally denoting it. Instead, the English landscape reminds the idea of an area modeled by human activities that still maintains the appearance of the countryside. Anyway, both paesaggio and landscape refer to an area defined by a human cultural projection, even coming back from diverse geographical and historical itineraries. This area-space has a material nature reflected in the immaterial perception of the landscape. 4 CORINTO Flemish painters of the XV century, and the Italian ones of the XVI century, were the first users of the concept of landscape, indicating their artistic work and diverging the cultural attention from the real to its representation (Martinet, 1983). The painted object—nature and the countryside—became the main subject of the representation. The human figures were reduced to a subordinated visual role, and undersized in the surface dimensions of the painting, even if they were the protagonists of religious stories and key sacred figures. The prevailing idea is that a landscape is the visual appearance of the undivided environment, in contradiction with the concept of a human community that borders and privatizes the space. The landscape of the paintings still lets us sense the undivided infinity of space, of which the human gaze can only catch a part. However, even if the first use was artistic, the concept of landscape elaborated by humans still contains the idea of using nature; the immaterial power of the eye becomes the material power of stone-borders that define the limits of an inhabited place. The view as far as the eye can see could be parceled in bordered areas (enclosures) for farming with private interest, ensuring revenues for farmers and taxes for the King, granting the right of property land division (Williamson, 2000). Without a doubt, the abilities of Dutch farmers were fit enough to transform the detached gaze of Flemish painter into the material reclamation of the natural environment, building up marine dams, and canalizing rivers even upon the farming ground level. The perception of the communal landscape became the individual appropriation of nature, treated as a resource to be transformed into productive capital. The environment becomes landscape when it is modified and shaped to be suitable for human settlement, its aesthetic tastes, invention, and individual and collective creativity, human prerogatives that determine the way to design and plan the use of space. The artistic representation, in particular through landscape painting, makes visible the design intent that human beings possess towards nature. The landscape derives from the aesthetic intention that human beings project on the environment. It is the material symbol of a very wide range of human values and human attitudes, is a social construction, expression of power, interests, points of view. Using sight, looking is always a subjective act. The landscape can therefore be understood as a way of seeing, as the voluntary way of composing and structuring the world of a spectator detached from it (Cosgrove, 1985). Unlike in Italian, the English language allows a significant combination between me (I) and eye (eye) which are pronounced in the same way (/aɪ/), emphasizing the geographical and geopolitical power inherent in the human gaze (Ò Tuathail, 1996). The landscape exists only in the power of the sight of human beings and in the historical evolution of the way of seeing and looking, of imposing the power of the gaze on nature from a certain point of view, as if it were a painting, but also THE EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE CONVENTION AND THE CASE OF ITALY AFTER TWENTY YEARS 5 a literary tale, as an aesthetic-patrimonial improvement that humanity imposes on nature. The subjectivity of the point of view implies that the relationship between human beings and landscape has a perceptive nature. Indeed, the landscape is essentially the structuring that the human mind makes of the world (Tuan, 1977). The individual interiority can determine the way of perceiving the landscape, according to a preexisting subjective spirituality, for which count all the experiences previously tried. Human beings perceive a sense in the objects that make up the landscape because they recognize it as a personal or shared history, composed of both matter and spirit (Schama, 1995). The landscape can be depicted in a painting with camouflage intent, to adhere as much as possible to the truth, although using only two dimensions that oblige the artist to employ a “deceptive” technique able to represent the three dimensions perceived by the eye when looking at a real landscape. The painted image is a representation of reality, whose “reality” depends on the painter’s perception, on his technical ability, on his cultural background, on his poetics. In this sense, it is a medium of meanings and sentiments. In the pictorial work of Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) the landscape becomes ideal, in the space of the painting the objects are represented according to a harmonious representation and a visual order that highlights the natural elements compared to human or sacred events staged. The landscape is the protagonist, not the scene itself, nor the simple background of the action. Emblematic of this poetic ideal of Carracci are the two lunettes painted by Annibale Carracci for the Aldobrandini Chapel, and today at the Galleria Dora Pamphilij, in Roma, entitled Paesaggio con la Fuga in Egitto (1602-04) e Paesaggio con la Sepoltura di Cristo (1604) (Pics. 1, and 2). This compositional invention had an extraordinary artistic influence and was particularly developed by French landscape painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, both considered masters of the genre. It seems clear that this pictorial poetics has greatly influenced the idea that the landscape is the apparent form of the environment, the territory, the visual context of human experience, the medium that allows the encounter between nature and culture. The Making of a Landscape Policy in Italy The dual nature of the landscape, as a material thing and its immaterial representation, implies considerable challenges to politics. In Italy, even during the preunification period, the notion of the landscape was the object of an intense cultural debate and various normative interventions, assuming a definitive content only in 6 CORINTO Pic. 1 Annibale Carracci, Paesaggio con la fuga in Egitto Pic. 2. Annibale Carracci, Paesaggio con la Sepoltura di Cristo THE EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE CONVENTION AND THE CASE OF ITALY AFTER TWENTY YEARS 7 1922. Formerly, the interpretation of the concept was uncertain due to a political contrast between the will to protect historical beauties and the inviolability of private ownership. Difficulties in defining the concept of landscape organically were many and the lack of that time instruments for preserving it is evident. The political debate was about the necessity to protect the beautiful parts of the territory, considered like pieces of art and cultural heritage. Contrasting interests between heritage conservation and private ownership of art collections animated the political debate until 1909. This year, Congressman Giovanni Rosadi, jointly to Minister of Education Luigi Rava, presented a revolutionary text that included the protection of movable or immovable property of historical, artistic, archaeological, or paleo-ethnological interest. Rava wanted the proposal text does include other assets like gardens, forests, landscapes, waters, and natural sites with particular complex features. The Senate didn’t approve the text in its entirety, excluding the parts regarding the landscape figure. After some years of intense parliamentary confrontation, law no. 688/1912 included the protection of villas, parks, and gardens that have a historical or artistic interest. In 1910, Rosadi had already proposed a specific law for the protection of natural sites of historical and literary value or particular beauty (Balzani, 2004). The parliamentary process of the Rosadi proposal was tormented, with several contested versions, crossing the fall of three Governments, before the final version of the law in the so-called Legge Croce in 1922 (Bronzino & Cenci, 2019). During those years, well-reputed philosopher Benedetto Croce did animate the Italian debate and fought to have a landscape law. He promoted the notion of a landscape that includes natural beauties, perceived as and assimilated to astonishing paintings. His ideas have been implemented in 1922 by law no. 778/1922 that presumes the intervention of the State in case of public interest for the protection of the landscape. The importance of the law descends from some key points. First of all, the identification of natural beauties, considered for their aesthetic-panoramic features, as the object of protection. Secondly, the introduction of the public interest on selected parts of the territory, to be crystallized at the same moment of the declaration of public interest. Thirdly, the attribution to the Ministry of Public Education of the power of limiting the building and modification of edifices. A similar concept of landscape was confirmed during the Fascist regime. In 1939, Giuseppe Bottai, the Minister of National Education, implemented two laws on the topic, which assumed the appellation of Leggi Bottai. The first one, law no. 1497/39, stated norms for the protection of natural beauties. The second one, law no. 1089/39, ruled the protection of artistic and historical goods (Coccolo, 2017). Italy was becoming an industrial country, evolving from its previous socioeconomic rural figure, and the introduction of limits of land use was apparent in the national urban planning legislation. The Bottai laws recognized the role of landscape beauties and cultural, historical, and natural heritage, maintained and reinforced by the people’s identity and unity. 8 CORINTO After World War II, the Italian Constitution proclaimed on December 27th, 1947, and enacted on January 1st, 1948, introduced many innovations including specific landscape protection. The short text of Article 9 is properly dedicated to the issue. “The Republic promotes the development of culture and scientific and technical research. “It protects the Nation’s landscape and historical and artistic heritage.” (Senato della Repubblica, 2012, p. 10, my translation) The first paragraph of the article was approved immediately. The second one derived from an intense and not completely exhaustive debate during the Constituent Assembly. Even successive positions of constitutional lawyers and scholars have been varied for decades. In the mid-1970s, a new jurisprudence emerged, linking the first and the second paragraphs with a new meaning. Scholars recognized factual linkages between cultural, techno-scientific development and the landscape, and between landscape and the historical-cultural heritage (Ainis & Fiorillo, 2008). In 1977, the Decree of the President of the Republic no. 616/1977 put the landscape within the relations between the environment and land planning. The vision is typically that of urban planning, which considers the whole Italian territory, as stated by the Italian urban planning law of 1942 (Law no. 1150, dated 17 August 1942). In 1985, the law 431/1985, known as Legge Galasso, by the name of its promoter Giuseppe Galasso, introduced key innovations on landscape policies. One year later, the Italian Parliament instituted the first Minister of the Environment. The Galasso law extended the concept of landscape beyond any aesthetic assets, subjecting a large part of the territory to environmental constraints by considering cultural and socioeconomic features from a geographical point of view. Notwithstanding the evident progress, in the Italian land management persisted a sort of confusion between urban planning and the landscape jurisdictions, and a blurred division of duties and responsibilities between State and the Regions. The problematic point is the overlapping use of terms such as environment, territory, and landscape, with large academic and political confrontations, and the necessary intervention of the Italian Constitutional Court in case of State-Regions conflicts about jurisdictional competencies in practical issues. The turning point was the European Landscape Convention, known as the Florence Convention, adopted by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in July 2000 and enacted in Italy since September 1st, 2006. The StateRegions relations continued to be confused and conflicting, but some clearings did arise from the Italian Constitutional Court’s decisions. From 2007 onward, the Court stated the environment is a specific subject under the State protection and not only a point of intersection between different socioeconomic THE EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE CONVENTION AND THE CASE OF ITALY AFTER TWENTY YEARS 9 subjects. The landscape is clearly defined as the morphology of the territory, being the visual appearance of the environment (Immordino, 2008). Therefore, from a juridical point of view, landscape and environment are complementary but distinct terms. In practical terms, there are specific regulations that aim to resolve the differences between these two notions. One can consider that the landscape involves interests and values that have their material substrate in the territory, belonging to the culture of local communities, while the environment remains at values concerning the preservation of the biosphere and of natural elements, which support human life. The Irreducibility of the Aesthetics into the Politics The European Convention of the Landscape is a soft law because it only provides for the voluntary accession of the European States. Many of them have transposed the guidelines of the Convention by national laws, with no distinctions between beautiful, ugly, ordinary, degraded, urban, rural, but calling for integrated conservation, management, and planning actions for the entire landscape. Italy did it by adopting the Code of Heritage and Landscape in its final drafting of Law 14/2006, which imposed the updating of Regional landscape plans already adopted following the preceding Legge Galasso. The Code has delegated the reform of existing landscape plans to the individual Regions to bring them into line with the guidelines for democratic participation in decision-making, a key innovation introduced by the Convention. A notable fact is that almost all the Italian Regions have developed and/ or adopted a new landscape plan, but only 3, Puglia, Sardinia, and Tuscany, have finally approved it (Voghera & La Riccia, 2016). Regional landscape plans are a real and fundamental opportunity to treat the landscape as a collective asset, as a commons, as a heritage of the local community. The community is justly entitled to find the right way to land management in a democratic political environment. This is particularly cogent to avoid the last and final abandonment of land and agricultural cultivation in the most difficult areas, in Italy located in the inner part of the territory. In this context, the participation of the population in landscape planning, through shared decision-making, is of particular importance as the only chance of success for the preservation of the landscape as a whole. The experiences of certain Italian regions in committing the public appear to be relevant. The main sociopolitical tool adopted is the landscape observatory, which is considered as feasible tool to stimulate and allow democratic participation. Italian Regions adopted a double method for the establishment of these observatories; a bottom-up scheme, with the direct contribution of civil society to landscape management, and a top-down scheme, with the prevalent public initiative in favor 10 CORINTO of the communities. Regions that have set up national or regional observers are Lombardy, Province of Trento, Veneto, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany, Marche, Molise, Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria and Sardinia. Piedmont has set up a series of local observatories connected online. Both the above-said methods could result as intrinsically weak and ineffective. A voluntary bottom-up action, without public authority feedback, can be pointless and ineffective, provoking even the public delusion. The mere exclusively top-down imposition of rules without actual public participation could be ineffective as well, because not committed people could practice differently from dictated rules. The conservation, management, and planning of the landscape is a process intimately linked to the collaborative encounter between institutions and local communities. The real intrinsic risk of the 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. 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