Landscape planning. Issues and tools

The attention towards the concepts of landscape, environment and territory and their mutual interrelationships, have engaged, since the early years of the twentieth century, the political class, the cultural and disciplinary world in the definition of new approaches to landscape protection and planning. The normative dispositions that followed over more than a century of debates reflect the evolution of the theoretical-cultural thought developed around the themes of definition, representation, evaluation and landscape planning. After the initial and ambitious objectives of recognition, conservation and protection (Laws 778/1920 and 1497/1939), the themes of management, enhancement, redevelopment, restoration or creation of landscapes are becoming increasingly important (European Landscape Convention, 2000, Legislative Decree 42/2004). Starting from a careful examination of cultural contributions and political-institutional changes, which have had a profound effect on the definition of the tools for protecting and enhancing the common identity assets, the paper aims to outline the state of implementation of landscape planning intended as a tool to deliver our cultural heritage to future generations, today more than in the past, undermined in its physical-morphological, landscape-environmental and symbolic-perceptive continuity.