Cultural Landscapes in International Charters

The contribute wants to show how the concepts of landscape and cultural landscape fit within the international debate by reading the international charts, the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention concerning the protection of the word cultural and natural heritage to the 2005 Faro Convention. Starting from the concept of heritage formulated in the World Heritage Convention (WHC) we will take into consideration the concept of cultural landscape expressed in the “Guidelines on the inscriptions of specific types of properties on the word heritage list” (representing the evolution of the WHC) and in the European Landscape Convention. We finally will examine the contributions at the international debate given by to the 2003 Convention for safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage and the 2005th Faro Convention on the value of cultural heritage. The WHC expressed heritage as a set of properties that have exceptional significance, strictly separated into two categories of "cultural heritage" and "natural heritage". It was born from the desire to protect them from degradation also due to social changes and economic changing conditions in those years. Since 1992 the category of "cultural landscapes" was included in the “Guidelines on the inscriptions of specific types”: they represent one of the specific properties to be protected because they illustrate the evolution of human society. The 2000 European Landscape Convention (ELC) instead recognizes value to each type of landscape as a bearer of meaning, even those degraded. The two different interpretations of landscape and cultural landscape given from the Guidelines and the ELC are affected by the different roles of the institutions which pertain, UNESCO and the Council of Europe. The WHC refers in only to sites that have an "exceptional universal value", while the ELC emphasizes the value of the landscape as an area of human activity. Together they help us to understand how in the debate on cultural heritage there are different views of the same property.