A critical treatment of the theme of Landscape cannot be settled in a few words. In recent years the subject has come to attention for reasons not so much traceable to the internal debate, even if we have witnessed a fair increase in publications and interventions, as thanks, in this case too, to the impetus of the European Community.
In fact this topic has lain forgotten and buried among the paperwork since the very dawn of the Republican era, until a document appeared, back in 2000, entitled "European Landscape Convention". It is this that finally managed to lift our subject out of the torpor to which it had been relegated.
The sense of these notes is anticipated by the words of the title.
First of all there arises the question of the existence of a "landscape question" in our country. It is a well-known matter, commonly spoken of yet with no solution in sight. We live in a condition of social removal. Initiatives and workshops on landscape continue to be promoted, across the various fields such as tourism, on the Bel Paesaggio, the Grand Tour in Italy, without any reservation about the state of the modern landscape produced in the Republican era.
The other aspect is that of attempting, as would seem necessary, a "critique", in its broadest and also most concrete sense, that is, one from which some proposal useful to the purpose might emerge.
More generally, to set up an attempt at critique it is necessary to retrace the whole affair, setting out to reconstruct the entire sequence, going back to re-decipher the original knot of development, so as to gain awareness of the mechanisms to be repaired or the obstacles to be removed, if one wishes realistically to address the subject of what would need to be done.
Now, as we have already said, on this occasion it is not possible to treat the subject systematically. We shall limit ourselves to the major topics, the fundamental chapters on the level of a cultural perspective, underlining the anomalies and the delays in implementation with respect to the framework and the horizons that in theory the country would have given itself, but which it seems not to acknowledge.
In this sense, then, the first point we must consider is that there is nothing to change at the level of the system of rules and objectives, at least as regards the foundations and the general principles. These are all defined and clear, ready to be applied.
If anything, what would be needed here too is a simplification, and a realignment among rules that are often contradictory and disjointed across sectoral measures that coexist and frequently diverge. If anything, we may say that there are too many rules.
This contradictory system, between the body of defined general principles and orientations on the general scale, does not translate into integrated acts useful to the purpose. So the sense gets lost along the way.
Once the objective is lost, nothing remains but bureaucratic complications.
I would say, then, that this is the topic we shall try to deal with.
Having made these premises, we are bound to enter into the broader theme of the non-application of the Constitutional precept in Italy.
The theme of landscape turns out to be emblematic in this regard.
If the spare yet imperative words of Article 9 of the Constitutional Charter promise that the Republic protects the landscape, it is hard to explain what the reason may have been for programmatically avoiding the promised protection, from 1948 onward. On this we must be precise. Or rather, one could identify a whole series of causes and interests, legitimate or not, that advised or allowed this outcome. Certainly it was a matter of protecting interests that were diverse and often in conflict with the public interest: interests favouring a vision of the country not founded on the protection and enhancement of heritage, the theme of building as the economic driver of the country, and finally an evasive and artfully diversionary use of the rules in force, "as if" the Constitution did not exist, or existed only for the future.
From a formal point of view, play was made on a misunderstanding that many evidently found useful.
We should recall that in the very years of the drafting and promulgation of the Constitution there were in force both the body of laws of June 1939, certainly at the cutting edge for the time, which go under the name of the Bottai Laws, for cultural and archival heritage and for the protection of the landscape, and, as we know, town-planning legislation itself, which came into being in 1942. Thus, in the time of the Republic, there existed a legacy coming directly from the Fascist period that represented a continuity in administrative practice, in the everyday civil life ordinarily conducted by institutions and citizens, and that was there at everyone's disposal, already tried and tested, and that, among so many things to be rebuilt, provided a resource immediately usable for transformations of the territory in general, landscape included.
So why should anyone have troubled themselves over Article 9 of the Constitution, when it was not yet clear exactly what it might serve for, certainly as regards its territorial aspects.
With these considerations, and without much concern, and above all without concern for the work that a consistently Republican approach would have entailed, it was possible to proceed at once with reconstruction, and then with the boom in the development of the building economy.
And so we have reached our own times.
That is, in short, the rules and provisions created in the years between 1939 and 1942, years that must have meant something, are the only ones that have allowed the growth and transformation of the territory in Italy. Changes, variations, additions and amendments have taken place, but the framework, the structure, the foundations have not changed.
Now, without going into the merits and the detail, we shall confine ourselves to treating this theme in relation to the Landscape.
First of all, we cannot think that the Constitution merely meant to recall that the laws of the period just left behind existed. The Constitution, we should hold, was not meant to concern itself with the abolition of pre-existing rules, and so, when it reminds the new Republic of the task of protecting the Landscape and the historical and artistic heritage of the Nation, it must have meant something else.

In fact there is a point that has been overlooked, though it is hard to say whether in good faith.
The Bottai Laws limited their action to the "restricted zones", which do not extend to the whole territory but only to those falling within the perimeter of the restriction. Moreover, we must bear in mind that these zones placed under restriction do not derive from a systematic study of the territory, but turn out to be entirely random and informal. They arise from opinions expressed by the local "notables" or by citizens with some standing, even in generic form, who ask from time to time, according to undefined dynamics and procedures, that the authority proceed to restrict a territory. A restriction that is, moreover, mild and lacking clearly identifying features, which for instance do not envisage the criterion of applying restrictions of absolute non-buildability, save in very limited cases. Furthermore, it is essential to recall that the zones excluded from restriction are so not because they are deemed unworthy of protection, but only because they were not examined, not subjected to any assessment in any sense.
Thus, on the basis of the pre-war provisions and despite those amendments or additions, such as for instance the provisions on the Environment, a different thing from the Landscape, we have arrived, since nothing else has happened, at a set of so-called restricted areas that represent a limited portion of the national territory, and conversely at a wide portion of territory not assessed or examined from the landscape point of view, where no degree of protection has been expressed. This runs counter to the constitutional obligation, which is certainly not an obligation to protect and to impose blanket restrictions over the whole national territory, but rather an obligation on the part of the Republic to know and to classify in terms of the landscape quality expressed and interpreted, this as a guarantee of the constitutional dictate.
Among other things, we must be quite clear that the seemingly uncontrolled and uncontrollable development of those wide areas of the country, the plains, the coasts and the low hills, where development, distorted too, has concentrated with undoubted heavy consequences for the landscape, was able to occur because of this aberration just mentioned. Anyone familiar with public administration, or with institutions or professional practice in the building sector and the like, knows well how much of a priority, for any programme of new construction, is the search for those blessed "unrestricted areas". As we have said, these are areas not subject to the 1939 restriction, which in general have not been the object of any assessment in terms of any provision that does not refer back to 1939, as regards the consequences of Article 9.
This whole picture, already in itself thin on meaningful content for a practice of the conscious transformation of the territory, is further complicated by the European Landscape Convention, signed in Florence in 2000 and transposed by our country in 2006. We are now more than ten years on from that transposition.
This document defines the content of the word "Landscape" as that which "designates a given part of territory, as perceived by populations, whose character derives from the action of natural and/or human factors and from their interrelations."
It is a concise definition which is nonetheless sufficient to bring out the determining factors, that is, the character of a territory in which there is manifest and put forward an activity of the population that attains, through a work of interpretation, its own shared perception of the natural and human factors and of the interrelations among them. Hence an environment, a habitat transformed and shaped by a historical process of acts and actions that are visible as traces of the memory and of the conception of a common space.
In this sense we are dealing not simply with a document reducible to the map of restrictions, like one of the many documents of the Master Plan, but with a programme of general guidance, a sort of "Local Charter" that identifies and defines the community basis of the overall present state, so as to identify the prospects for maintenance and planned protection for the future and the legacies for the coming generations.
In short, in the absence of a path of this kind, territorial and town planning is not possible.
Thus the founding features of the 1948 constitutional appeal become evident, and the concerns that that terse appeal expressed, and at the same time the grave omissions or removals that our society, past and present, has had to, or chosen to, undergo.
Now, unfortunately, in this case too it will not be the civic capacity of national society, nor still less the capacity of the ruling class and of politics, that can set in motion a process of awareness and transformation of the real practices of territorial governance, and hence of the rules of transformation that then bear upon the landscape. It is the judiciary, and the advancement of the debate in the courts, starting with the constitutional one, that have already brought out the first signals to a society that, distracted or indifferent, therefore does not perceive them.
The issue is that of the impracticability of continuing territorial planning, and hence town planning at the various levels, in the absence of the precondition that comes before town planning, both in terms of what we have already meant to touch on at the opening of this contribution, and, by now, on the basis of the contents of the European Convention.
In this respect we must finally point out that the procedure used by the bodies governing territorial and landscape practices, Umbria included, does not conform to the guidelines of the Convention itself.
The regional Landscape Plans and the related procedures, despite the references to the Convention carefully highlighted in the preambles of the regional programmes, neglect the most radical and innovative aspect of the Convention, namely the decisive role of the local Community in the processes and procedures of definition and approval. And this concerns the whole set of procedures initiated through the recurrent scheme of the State-Region Agreement.
It is worth recalling some premises that are not to be overlooked.

• The Landscape as a Republican and constitutional good, and hence not merely the preserve of state or regional bureaucracy.
• We must clarify once and for all that we should not confuse the so-called "public participation" procedures activated for the adoption and approval of town-planning instruments and their derivatives with the practices and functions of the local community in the formation of the Landscape Plan. Territorial planning is an instrument subordinate to the Landscape Plan, which alone, once defined, allows the existence of the PRG, the general municipal plan.
• The Convention provides for measures of encouragement, support, training and awareness-raising, including through funded programmes and projects, in order to increase the critical capacity and awareness of local communities, whose deficiency, especially in our country, is particularly evident, for complex reasons. The fact remains that the Landscape Plan is not simply an act within the competence of experts or professional operators, and if the local community or its representatives make manifest their presence, or the lack of consideration shown to them, they have the means to call the entire procedure into question.
• The actors of the Landscape Plan are the State and its professional apparatus (which, however, cannot be limited to the current version of the Ministry or of the Superintendencies, which have not been reformed or supplemented on the premise of the constitutional content so as to overcome the limits and shortcomings of current legislation, as summarised above), the representative institutions starting with local ones, and the local Community of citizens. The Region therefore fulfils an essentially service and coordination role among the various territorial and institutional realities, but does not present itself as the central element. Moreover, the role and function of the State's apparatus appear particularly deficient.

To avoid or evade these steps is a grave responsibility also of the various social and cultural components of the country, which is unable to reform itself on the basis of the very regulatory and legislative content that is, after all, in force. It is enough, finally, to touch on the theme of non-buildability, evaded in Italy for obvious and banal reasons, a non-buildability which it is by now established cannot be achieved, as a legal principle, at the level of town-planning legislation, but which is on the contrary entirely feasible at the level of the discipline of the Landscape.

Fiesole, 28 September 2017

(info: http://paesaggioitaliano.beniculturali.it)

Pier Paolo Mattioni, an architect, worked in the field of town planning and territorial planning first in Tuscany with the Regional authority and at the Municipality of Fiesole, then in Orvieto, where he also handled the coordination of the activities connected with the special law for the consolidation of the Rupe. He is currently a member of the national executive board of the association "Amici della Terra" for the theme of Landscape and matters relating to the sustainable management of the waste cycle.