Reading and assessing the landscape as cultural and historical heritage
2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0142639042000288993
ISSN1469-9710
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation
ResumoAbstract Drawing upon research undertaken for the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities by a team at the University of Milan, an emerging and converging conception of landscape which is shared by many nations in Europe is identified. It is characterized by the integration of culture, by a shift of emphasis from places of excellence to consideration of the whole territory, by the wish to conserve cultural identity and by a concern for the quality of life of whole populations. In addition to regarding the landscape as an artefact, it can also be regarded as a document, an archive or a palimpsest. Shortcomings in the way that landscapes are currently read are identified, and the range of criteria employed to assess the values of particular landscapes are considered. Finally, there is a plea for a serious exchange of information regarding methodology and operational expertise, in the light of the European Landscape Convention. Keywords: European Landscape Conventioncultural landscapesheritagelandscape assessment Notes Polytechnic of Milan, Department of Architectural Designing, scientific director Lionella Scazzosi. Three volumes have been published. The first two concern the landscape policies and cultures in various European countries and in the United States (Scazzosi, 1999 Scazzosi L (1999) (Ed.) Politiche e culture del paesaggio. Esperienze internazionali a confronto (Landscape Policies and Culture. A Comparison of International Experiences), (Rome: Gangemi) [Google Scholar]) and the second one includes the English translation of the first volume too (Scazzosi, 2001 Scazzosi L (2001a) (Ed.) Politiche e culture del paesaggio. Nuovi confronti (Landscape Policies and Culture. New Comparisons), (Rome: Gangemi) [Google Scholar]a); the third volume deals with the landscape reading and assessing methodologies, in all the various countries already studied: France, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, United States, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Norway, Poland, Slovenia (Scazzosi, 2002 Scazzosi L (2002) (Ed.) Leggere il paesaggio. Confronti internazionali (Reading the Landscape. International Comparisons), (Rome: Gangemi) [Google Scholar]). The 1999 studies have been considered interesting and useful abroad too; integration of the situation of other countries that had not been taken into consideration initially (among them Italy) and translation of the texts was requested (Scazzosi, 2001 Scazzosi L (2001a) (Ed.) Politiche e culture del paesaggio. Nuovi confronti (Landscape Policies and Culture. New Comparisons), (Rome: Gangemi) [Google Scholar]a). The Minister was assigned a specific Directorate General for landscape that supported Italy's strong involvement in the drawing up of the European Landscape Convention (eventually it hosted it for the signature in Florence, in October 2000) and in organizing the National Conference on Landscape—the first one any Italian Government had ever staged (October 1999). This is how Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro—from the Directorate General for Environmental and Landscape Heritage—described the goals of the study, in her introduction to the first book reporting the results of the research that had been presented and disseminated during the Conference (Scazzosi, 1999 Scazzosi L (1999) (Ed.) Politiche e culture del paesaggio. Esperienze internazionali a confronto (Landscape Policies and Culture. A Comparison of International Experiences), (Rome: Gangemi) [Google Scholar], p. 7). The countries taken into account in the study were: France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States. The complexity of the issue and the broadness of the experiences underway impede the authors from defining a systematic or exhaustive cognitive picture that would correspond to the different realities of the various national situations. Nevertheless, the study provides a valid comparison between the different cultural conceptions and operational models although it cannot escape some kind of conditioning due—of course, as in any such research—to the authors' cultural viewpoint and to the original goals of the study. Let us just mention the difference between: the rigid geometry of the German Landscape Plans, based on a Law for the Protection of Nature, which considers the whole territory especially from the ecologic and environmental point of view and chooses to apply the preservation laws to natural areas; the broadness and multiplicity of instruments of planning, preservation, enhancement, participation, in France, that come out of a legal matrix that foresees the preservation of outstanding monuments and ends in a specific law for landscape (1993) that adds landscape contents to local land‐use planning; the Great Britain system with its recent and mainly perceptive‐visual reading methodologies set on a legal system aiming at preserving areas that are outstanding thanks to their ‘natural beauty’ and their recreational value; the Polish and Danish experimentations that tend to apply to a vaster open territory those reading and preservation methodologies already experimented with in the urban landscape; the long‐lasting Italian tradition of preservation of outstanding areas intended as ‘natural beauties’ and cultural heritage, now applied to the whole territory through landscape planning and subject to a strong decentralization of the competences, although the central role of the State remains; the use, in Switzerland, of federal censuses (of historic roads, protected natural areas, etc.) as an essential instrument for landscape planning at local level; the more recent experiences, such as in Spain, that propose new types of areas to be protected and enhanced (cultural parks) and experiment with many cognitive instruments of planning and management; and the Slovenia experience that aims at building its own and specific operational system. It would be very useful to have a comparative study of the various European countries' history of law on landscape, nature and historic heritage and the underlying concepts of landscape; it is already significant to see, in a first analysis, that the laws for the preservation of nature and landscape were drawn up and approved mainly during the first decade of the 20th century and that they all contain—although not all equally nor with the same emphasis—some references to the concepts of landscape intended as ‘natural beauties’ and of nature (Scazzosi, 1999 Scazzosi L (1999) (Ed.) Politiche e culture del paesaggio. Esperienze internazionali a confronto (Landscape Policies and Culture. A Comparison of International Experiences), (Rome: Gangemi) [Google Scholar], 2001 Scazzosi L (2001a) (Ed.) Politiche e culture del paesaggio. Nuovi confronti (Landscape Policies and Culture. New Comparisons), (Rome: Gangemi) [Google Scholar]a, 2002 Scazzosi L (2002) (Ed.) Leggere il paesaggio. Confronti internazionali (Reading the Landscape. International Comparisons), (Rome: Gangemi) [Google Scholar]). Testo Unico dei beni culturali (1999), a document guiding the reorganization of the existing rules for the preservation of historic/cultural heritage and landscape; agreement between the State and the regions (Accordo tra Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e le Regioni e le Province Autonome di Trento e Bolzano sull'esercizio dei poteri in materia di paesaggio, Official Bulletin no. 114, 18 May 2001) for a first application of the contents of the European Landscape Convention although it was not yet ratified; and, finally, the Codice dei Beni Culturali e del Paesaggio, in force from May 2004, that brings together former laws, rules and agreements in order to reorganize them and to introduce new ones in an additional part dedicated to landscape. Here too, the studies (Scazzosi, 2002) have mostly reverted to the reading methodologies used in the administrative and technical bodies, and somehow neglected scientific and university research that is undoubtedly important but has contributed to a lesser extent and less directly to the diffused culture of landscape. These researches have been entrusted to the Polytechnic of Milan, in the framework of the Cadses Interreg IIc programme—‘Let’s Care Method' (Scazzosi, 2001 Scazzosi L (2001b) (Ed.) The Landscape Heritage: Study Methods and Indicators for Landscape Planning and Governance. The Torcello and Altino case‐study, Programma Interreg II C‐CADSES “Let's care method” (Milan: Politecnico di Milano) [Google Scholar]b), to the Italian Society of Urbanists (Clementi, 2002 Clementi A (Ed.) (2002) Interpretazioni di paesaggio (Rome: Meltemi) [Google Scholar]), to the Univeristy of Genoa, in the framework of the Interreg IIc programme—Western Mediterranean and Western Alps (Regione Sardegna, 2002 Regione Sardegna (2002) Paesaggi mediterranei e alpini Progetto Interreg II C Med‐Occ (Cagliari: Doglio) [Google Scholar]). Here are some bibliographic references to recent texts that summarize and go through the history of the different disciplinary attitudes (Gambino, 1997 Gambino R (1997) Conservare innovare. Paesaggio, ambiente, territorio (Turin: Utet) [Google Scholar], pp. 16–42; Guichonnet, 1998 Guichonnet P (1998) Il paesaggio in Benetti D Langé S (Eds) Il paesaggio lombardo pp. 15–22 (Sondrio: Regione Lombardia) [Google Scholar]; Langé, 1999 Langé S (1999) Soggetti. Storia. Paesaggio (Milan: Mursia) [Google Scholar], pp. 170–183; Mangani, 1987 Mangani G (1987) Verso un nuovo concetto di paesaggio in Boriani M Scazzosi L (Eds) Natura e architettura. La conservazione del patrimonio paesistico pp. 19–42 (Milan: Città studi) [Google Scholar], pp. 19–42; Olwig, 2002 Olwig K (2002) Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain's Renaissance to America's New World (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press) [Google Scholar]). In‐depth analysis about the concept of landscape through history at a ‘glance’ comes from contributions of philosophers who recently focused on this issue, both in Italy and abroad (Assunto, 1973 Assunto R (1973) Il paesaggio e l'estetica (Naples: Giannini) [Google Scholar], 1984 Assunto R (1984) Il parterre e i ghiacciai (Palermo, Novecento) [Google Scholar]; Venturi Ferriolo, 1996 Venturi Ferriolo M (1996) Leggere il mondo. Il paesaggio documento della natura e della storia in A‐Letheia. Giardino e paesaggio. Conoscenza, conservazione, progetto no. 7 pp. 130–131 (Florence: Alinea) [Google Scholar], 2002 Venturi Ferriolo M (2002) Etiche del paesaggio (Rome: Editori Riuniti) [Google Scholar]), also recalling fundamental texts (Ritter, 1963 Ritter J (1963) Landscaft (Münster: Verlag Aschendorff) [Google Scholar]; Simmel, 1912 Simmel G (1912–13) Filosofia del paesaggio in Simmel G (1985) Il volto e il ritratto. Saggi sull'arte pp. 71–83 (Bologna: Il Mulino), (Italian transl.) [Google Scholar]–13). In particular they underline, as we do presently, the notion of ‘landscape’ as a ‘place to read the world’; that is, the space where the world can be read in its complexity or say the place where our history can be gazed at (Venturi Ferriolo, 1996 Venturi Ferriolo M (1996) Leggere il mondo. Il paesaggio documento della natura e della storia in A‐Letheia. Giardino e paesaggio. Conoscenza, conservazione, progetto no. 7 pp. 130–131 (Florence: Alinea) [Google Scholar]). The contribution is particularly significant as it tackles the ever‐tricky issue of landscape aesthetics, and points out how the aesthetic values that we confer today to places—transforming them in this way into landscapes—are closely connected to the possibility to read and observe in them the complexity of the world's history, as it has been built by the combined action of men and nature. In these values we can “single out the social changes, the changes in the ways of production, of dwelling, in urban shapes, in the ways of living, in the working and economic activities and, above all, in the vision of the world and life” (Venturi Ferriolo, 1999 Venturi Ferriolo M (1999) Lineamenti di estetica del paesaggio in: M. Venturi Ferriolo, M. Giacomini & L. Pesci, E. (Eds) Estetica del paesaggio, Antologia (Milan: Guerini) [Google Scholar], p. 59). In some landscapes “the material being is the result of a human operational process”, while others just confer a mere meaning to places where “the aesthetic being is not the result of a productive process but rather of an attribution of meaning adding to the material being, i.e. of the discovery, as we used to say, which transforms into aesthetical objects what was first considered as mere things” (Assunto, 1973 Assunto R (1973) Il paesaggio e l'estetica (Naples: Giannini) [Google Scholar], p. 29). Such attribution of meaning may be completely contemporaneous but also a heritage of past cultural elaboration. On this issue, see the contribution of Simon Schama (Schama, 1995 Schama S (1995) Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins) [Google Scholar]) and E. Turri (Turri, 1974 Turri E (1974) Antropologia del paesaggio (Milan: Ed. di Comunità) [Google Scholar], 1979 Turri E (1979) Semiologia del paesaggio italiano (Milan: Longanesi) [Google Scholar]), D. Cosgrove (Cosgrove, 1984 Cosgrove D (1984) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm), Italian transl. (1990) Realtà sociali e paesaggio simbolico (Milan: UNICOPLI) [Google Scholar]). Examples of such buildings may be: the terracings that have structured many hilly regions for the cultivation of grapevines, olive trees, fruit trees, chestnuts, etc; the complex waterway systems to cultivate lowlands; the deforestations and systems of production and exploitation of highlands to allow cattle breeding, including seasonal moving of men and animals, to exploit woods, flora and fauna, to the highest altitudes; the road and track systems that were to guarantee communication for commercial, productive, military, etc. purposes; the network of religious, military, etc. manufacts. The use of the term ‘manufact’ (artefact) is meant to underline the significance of building materials and techniques in the character of places and the action of men's hands intervening to shape it: the meanings of the terms manufatto (in Italian) and manufact (in French) still have today a stronger adherence to the etymologic root than the terms artefatto, artifact, artefact (from the Latin arte‐factus, art‐made). It has a long tradition in disciplines related to historic heritage preservation, in particular in Italy, where its introduction was aimed at underlining the importance of preserving the matter of works. One of the representatives of the wide concept of architecture, which bears a long tradition, is William Morris, according to whom architecture is the ensemble of the changes made on the earth's surface to satisfy human necessities, apart from plain desert (Morris, W., Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation, speech made at the London Institution, 10 March 1881). He also uses the term architecture to point out the possibility of reading natural places too, from the point of view of their spatial and material organization. The use of the term ‘architecture’ is undoubtedly somehow imprecise: it can be understood in a restrictive way in various cultural fields of both northern and southern European countries (meaning only what is built and excluding the natural aspects of places; only what concerns the characters of open spaces and excluding the whole building, the town), or it can be understood as too much related to the single field of architects. However, it is larger and more comprehensive than other terms such as ‘structure’, ‘shape’, ‘morphology’, ‘invariant’ and ‘design’, because: it includes the idea according to which places own a specific three‐dimensional organization, or say they are spaces made of elements that define them physically; it includes the awareness that spaces are made of building materials and techniques that determine their specificity (a road paving can completely change the character of a landscape); it includes the awareness of the inseparability between matter and shape (the shaped matter: the work is not shaped with matter, but rather matter is shaped) (Pareyson, 1988 Pareyson L (1988) Estetica (Milan: Bompiani) [Google Scholar]); it refers to functional organization of places and recalls economic, social, cultural etc. aspects that contribute to build places and imply various disciplines. Moreover, the disciplines tackling landscape are internationally called ‘landscape architecture’, although they are articulated in a very wide range of aspects and issues, going from the ecological and naturalistic ones to those concerning historic heritage preservation, or linked to the creation of new landscapes (IFLA, International Federation of Landscape Architects). For the visual perception and the psychological approach to landscape, see: Gibson, 1950 Gibson JJ (1950) The Perception of the Visual World (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin) [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Gombrich et al., 1972 Gombrich E Hochberg J Black M (1972) Art, Perception, and Reality (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press) Italian transl. (1978) Arte, percezione e realtà. Come pensiamo le immagini (Turin: Einaudi) [Google Scholar]; Ittelson, 1973 Ittelson WH (Ed.) (1973) Environment and Cognition (New York: Academic Press), Italian transl. (1978) La psicologia dell'ambiente (Milan: Franco Angeli) [Google Scholar]; Lynch, 1960 Lynch K (1960) The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), Italian transl. (1964) L'immagine della città (Venice: Marsilio) [Google Scholar]; Norberg‐Schulz, 1979 Norberg‐Schulz C (1979) Genius Loci. Paesaggio ambiente architettura (Milan: Electa), (Italian transl.) [Google Scholar]. The concept of the room applied to places has a long tradition in the art of making gardens and parks and is also used today for the landscape (Bogdanowsky, 1998 Bogdanowsky J (1998) Konserwacja i ohcrona krajobrazu kulturowego (evolucja metody) in: Teki Krakowski, VI (Krakow: Regionalny Osrodek Studiow), (with parallel English translation) [Google Scholar]). ‘Open work’ is the reading model drawn up by Umberto Eco for contemporary works of art (Eco, 1962 Eco U (1962) Opera Aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milan: Bompiani) [Google Scholar]), and whose implications were developed in further publications (Eco, 1990 Eco U (1990) I limiti dell'interpretazione (Milan: Bompiani) [Google Scholar]). The reading of what we inherited from the past as unconcluded work still has very old cultural roots. The concept seems to be particularly useful to express the willingness of a fundamental respect for each distinctive characteristic of the inherited places in a historic period characterized by great territorial transformations but, nevertheless, aware of the importance of preserving differences and specificities: places do not belong to us and we are responsible for their transmission to future generations. Simultaneously, the concept expresses the awareness of the impossibility of stopping time (and, even more, going back in time) and helps in defining the meaning of preservation, conservation and restoration as actions only able to guide and manage transformations, based on the full respect and on the transmission to the future of the inherited values. Paesaggio, paysage, paisaje, peisaj, landscape, landschaft, landschap, landscab, krai, taj: these are some terms used in various countries to express the concept of landscape: the first words (whose etymological root is pagus, village in Latin) mainly recall the presence of man on the territory, playing the double role of colonizer of Nature and observer of his own work; the others (whose terminological root is the German‐Anglo‐Saxon land) mainly underline the concept of men belonging to a community on a territory from which they extract their resources, and which is also an administrative unit (Franceschi, 1997 Franceschi C (1997) Du mot paysage et de ses équivalents dans cinq langues européennes in Collot M (Ed.) Les enjeux du paysage pp. 75–111 (Brussels: Ousia) [Google Scholar]; Langé, 2000 Langé S (2000) Scuole e correnti dell'analisi storica del paesaggio. Il Novecento in Proceeding of the Let's Care Method Workshop, ‘Paesaggio’ Venice, 23 June, available on CD, Regione Veneto (2000), Interreg II C‐CADSES—Let's care method [Google Scholar]; Schama, 1995 Schama S (1995) Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins) [Google Scholar], pp. 10–12; Venturi Ferriolo, 2002 Venturi Ferriolo M (2002) Etiche del paesaggio (Rome: Editori Riuniti) [Google Scholar], pp. 23–33). However they have both assumed—mainly during the 18th and 19th centuries—the meaning of ‘object of pictorial representation’, having an influence on national laws which were drawn up at the beginning of the 20th century to protect ‘natural beauties’, ‘natural monuments’ or ‘pictorial frames’ (France 1930, Italy 1939, Great Britain 1949, Germany 1935), according to the differences between one country and another. It is interesting enough to follow such transformations through the encyclopaedias: in Italy, for example, the entry ‘paesaggio’ in the Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani (1935) acknowledges basically the meaning of view, panorama, and gives much importance to the representation of places (paintings, drawings, photos, etc.) and to pictorial landscapism; the same can be observed in the 1960s in the Enciclopedia Universale dell'Arte, while, some years later, the Dizionario di Architettura e Urbanistica (1969) also refers to town planning, geographic, socio‐economic, perceptive and psychological interpretations. Ashworth and Howard (1999 Ashworth G Howard P (Eds) (1999) European Heritage, Planning and Management (Exeter: Intellect Books) [Google Scholar]), Gurrieri (1983 Gurrieri F (1983) Dal restauro dei monumenti al restauro del territorio (Florence: Sansoni) [Google Scholar]), UNESCO (1980 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) German Commission (1980) Protection and Cultural Animation of Monuments, Sites and Historic Towns in Europe (Melsungen‐Bonn: Bernecker) [Google Scholar]); the magazine Monuments Historiques has dedicated some monographic numbers to the culture of the preservation of historic heritage in different European countries. It is particularly useful to follow these changes through official documents, such as International Charters and Conventions on restoration, of international bodies like the Council of Europe, the European Union and UNESCO, those drawn up during conferences, research, and international agreements between countries and bodies (Añón Feliú, 2001 Añón Feliú C (2001) Cultura y naturaleza. Textos internacionales (Torrelavega: Asociación cultural Plaza Porticada) [Google Scholar]; Monti, 1995 Monti G (1995) La conservazione dei beni culturali nei documenti italiani e internazionali. 1931–1991 (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato) [Google Scholar]). The definition of ‘vegetal architectures’ was introduced in Italy through a text of the Lombardy Region (Regione Lombardia, 1987 Regione Lombardia (1987) Ecologia, Ambiente, Ricerche no. 1 pp. 92–95 [Google Scholar], 1994 Regione Lombardia (1994) Indirizzi per la tutela, conservazione e gestione di parchi, giardini e alter architetture vegetali, Deliberazione della Giunta regionale 18 maggio 1994, no. 5/52777 Bollettino Ufficiale della Regione Lombardia 30 29 July 1994, 3rd extra number [Google Scholar]), to define various typologies of architectures mainly built with vegetal material, as a widening of the concept of historic park and garden, that until then was mainly linked to buildings such as villas and houses: squares and tree avenues; gardens and public parks; gardens of public buildings like stations, schools, municipalities, hospitals; gardens as memorials of events and personalities of national or local history; extra‐urban avenues; monumental trees; urban kitchen gardens; kitchen gardens in residential areas, etc. Since the end of the 1970s other countries have also begun to care about these architectures that became an object of attention, survey and protection (Scazzosi, 1993 Scazzosi L (1993) Il giardino opera aperta. La conservazione delle architetture vegetali (Florence: Alinea) [Google Scholar], pp. 11–25). What is more, the locution ‘architectures végétales’ had already been used in the treaty of Le Baron Ernouf (1868), to indicate formal parks and gardens that were the core of his research. DOCOMOMO (Documentation and Conservation of Modern Movement), founded in 1995, is an international association dedicated to the documentation and preservation of buildings of the Modern Movement, sites and neighbourhoods of the recent past, broadly defined as 1920–1970: design objects, buildings, urban planning, landscapes and gardens, bridges, etc. The disciplines of restoration of monuments must intervene ever more on buildings of great modern architects that suffer specific problems of restoration that are very different from those of the older monuments. The concept of territory as a document and archive able to give back the knowledge of man's material culture was developed during the 20th century, in particular thanks to historians, geographers and archaeologists (Scazzosi, 1993 Scazzosi L (1993) Il giardino opera aperta. La conservazione delle architetture vegetali (Florence: Alinea) [Google Scholar], p. 16; Langé, 2000 Langé S (2000) Scuole e correnti dell'analisi storica del paesaggio. Il Novecento in Proceeding of the Let's Care Method Workshop, ‘Paesaggio’ Venice, 23 June, available on CD, Regione Veneto (2000), Interreg II C‐CADSES—Let's care method [Google Scholar]). Let us remember the contributions of the historians of the ‘Annales’, a review founded in 1929, with scholars such as Bloch, Febvre, Braudel in France; the Polish school with Kula, or Sereni in Italy; the contributions of geographers in France (Vidal de la Beache, Granchard, Claval, Guichonnet) and in Italy (Sestini, Biasutti, Saibene, Gambi, Quaini, Moreno); and the contributions of archaeologists in Italy (Bianchi Bandinelli, Carandini, Mannoni, De Guio) (Bortolotto, in Scazzosi, 2002 Scazzosi L (2002) (Ed.) Leggere il paesaggio. Confronti internazionali (Reading the Landscape. International Comparisons), (Rome: Gangemi) [Google Scholar]; Sereno, 1992 Sereno P (1992) [Google Scholar]) and in Great Britain (Perkins, Taylor, Barker, Aston, Rowley). Le Goff, recently, underlined the role of history in the construction of memory and identity (Le Goff, 1977 Le Goff J (1977) Storia e memoria (Turin: Einaudi) [Google Scholar]). The concept of ‘palimpsest’—used for a long time in disciplines such as historic heritage preservation and archaeology and also applied to territory and landscape (Barker, 1977 Barker P (1977) Tecniche dello scavo archeologico (Milan: Longanesi) [Google Scholar]; Corboz, 1983 Corboz A (1983) Il territorio come palinsesto Diogène 121 (January–March) pp. 14–35 Italian translation in: Casabella (1985) 516 pp. 22–27 [Google Scholar])—is here referred to in its etymological sense (from the Greek palı`n ‘newly’ and psàn ‘to scratch out’, when antique parchment manuscripts were newly written on, on top of the old writing scratched out) to signal the existence, in the present state of places, of numerous physical traces left over time by the work of man and nature, each time adding to or changing or erasing or overlapping, etc. one another and not necessarily being re‐interpreted or re‐used. See the archaeological studies in France on land parcelling, the Italian studies on centuriation, the censuses and databases on historic centres carried out in most countries, the studies on historic roads in Switzerland and Great Britain, etc. (Scazzosi, 2002 Scazzosi L (2002) (Ed.) Leggere il paesaggio. Confronti internazionali (Reading the Landscape. International Comparisons), (Rome: Gangemi) [Google Scholar]). The division into material and immaterial permanencies comes from the self‐same concept of landscape (i.e. attribution of meanings to places, but also identification of material traces as a document of the past), while the attribution to the whole inherited territory of the value of document and, in addition to that, of an historic document (Scazzosi, 2002, pp. 33–36 (Italian), pp. 53–55 (English translation), requires a systemization of the types of permanencies. From this point of view, let us mention the significant UNESCO division of the ‘cultural landscapes’ (Fowler, 2003 Fowler PJ (2003) World Heritage Cultural Landscapes 1992–2002 UNESCO World Heritage Papers no. 6, (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) [Google Scholar]) into different categories: ‘clearly defined landscape’, ‘organically evolved landscape’ (which can be: ‘relict or fossil‐landscape’ and ‘continuing landscape’) and ‘associative cultural landscape’. Europe hosts many initiatives aimed at preserving the landscapes which own much historic evidence, generally rural evidence. Let us cite, for example, the Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape (PECSRL), an international network of landscape researchers, focused on the past, present and future of European rural landscapes; or RURALIA, an Italian association for the preservation of rural buildings and places, that is part of a big network of similar associations in other European countries. The main contributions to a systematic reading of the historic traces left in the current state of the landscape at a quite detailed scale are: the Historic Landscape Assessment (HLA) in Great Britain (Breda & Vasey, in Scazzosi, 2002 Scazzosi L (2002) (Ed.) Leggere il paesaggio. Confronti internazionali (Reading the Landsca
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