History for places (La storia per i luoghi)

The author highlights the importance of stating a few new tracks to identify “historical” landscapes; these new principles, though not yet a methodical approach, begin to show how the characters of land differing throughout the ages could be investigated analytically. So, the aim is not, or not only, scientific reconstruction of one or more historical phases of a context - which is actually a land and urban archaeology task - but analytical enquiring into anything we all perceive and enjoy today, or suffer when precluded, altered, wiped out: the historical peculiarities of a territory. It fits exactly to the subject the example of the “urban olive tree forest” of north-west Sardinia, though dealt with from an unusual point of view; it’s about typically historical places - a definition full of evocative force - which actually form a context heavy with aesthetic, economic, cultural and, as for peoples, quite affective values. A context which shows emblematic even in a negative sense: due to a destiny marked by the sneaky corrosion of “visual mess” (the landscape eclipse) caused by sudden overwhelming of sprawl and the obviously following thoughtless infrastructural network.