Search

The text analyses the cartography produced between the late Middle Ages and the Unification of Italy (and the Carta d’Italia of the Military Survey Office): among the most important categories of documented sources for the history of viability and the area. The original maps (almost all hand-drawn) prevail, drawn for the ancient states or upper classes for the purpose of military or civil management, control and enhancement of the territory. Beyond the metrics and topographic contents, the utilisation of historical maps requires research in public and private land registries of Italy and other countries, which is not always easy. It furthermore requires a rational critical evaluation of the products and with this the necessary contextualisation of administrative and political-economic-social strategic practice to which they belong. The text addresses historical cartography (general maps of various scales and road types) used for the study of viability, including the numerous pilgrim routes that cross Tuscany from north to south, passing through the Appennino, through the crossings of Lunigiana and Valtiberina. The official Tuscan products, as well as those of its sub-regions and communities (whose road network is highlighted) stand out among others, and also singular street routes, particularly those drawn during the second half of the 18th century and the first decades of the 20th century when the geometric cadastre was completed. Almost all of them were needed to be able to rule the territory and often to plan and carry out important public work as well as modernisation of communication infrastructure.

The volume “The Landscape”, edited by the geographer Aldo Sestini in 1963 in the collection dedicated to Italy of the Italian Touring Club, represents the first original attempt of a careful description-interpretation of Italian Landscapes, classified in 95 types (grouped in 9 forms), on the basis of geological, morphological and climatic factors. The work deserves nowadays to be “reused” for “active” aims, such as geography teaching, landscape education, realization of cultural itineraries for tourist aims, editing of detailed monographs of of local landscape units. The new functions demand the integration of historical analysis with the geographical one, to build index maps shared and suitable to give substance to landscape planning tools, as defined by the Codice dei Beni Culturali e del Paesaggio.

Geography can help knowing the territory-landscape nexus – a true “complex archive”(Lucio Gambi), a “historic document” made of “many stories at the same time” (Paola Sereno), “a sort of memoir recording and summarising the history of the territorial designs of humans” (Massimo Quaini) – thanks to a structuralist-objectivist line of research. This is focused on the construction of representations/interpretations, as general as possible, of territorial forms and contents, supported by a regional scale analysis. Such orientation is appropriate to the new Italian regulatory and planning framework for territory and landscape, reviving the traditional descriptive and interpretive value of geography renewed – in concepts and methods – by Gambi, Quaini and Sereno, and re-aggregating landscape and regional geography, at the sub-regional and local scale. For a structural knowledge of territory-landscape, in fact, Geography becomes crucial, provided that its analysis outlines the specific historical processes that generated it, coupling the study of places and heritage (whole categories and single cultural assets) to regional geography. This requires a diachronic approach and methods, techniques, tools and sources – on field as well as in libraries, archives and laboratories – strictly adequate to the topic each time addressed.