In what dynamics of our inner balance does the landscape relationship flow? We have tried to summarise them in three actions: inhabiting, exploring, contemplating, which must be fulfilled as a whole, at different times and in different spaces

In what dynamics of our inner balance does the landscape relationship flow? We have tried to summarise them in three actions: inhabiting, exploring, contemplating. We have also hypothesised that each person can achieve the integration of ‘landscape well-being’ only by satisfying the requirements of all three actions, in even different times and spaces, in any case in a cocktail, even if the proportions between the three parts vary according to cultural and sentimental biographies and personal situations. So, at a naive assessment, one might say that the therapeutic landscape is the one that reintegrates each person’s well-being, altered and broken down by the unsatisfied demand for a landscape to inhabit, or to explore, or to contemplate.

Landscape-free therapeutic materials

Etymata induce rethinking and overthinking in the ordinary course of ideas. In Greek, ‘terapeo’ has as its first meaning ‘to serve’, ‘to serve in a subordinate position’. ‘salus’, on the other hand, shares with ‘salvus’ the Sanskrit root sarvah, which implies ‘unity, wholeness’.

Hence, therapy as an aid service to regain health, that is, an aid to those who have broken down, to recover their unity, to recompose themselves in unum.

So, if we respect the first meaning, a ‘therapeutic’ landscape is a landscape that performs a support service, and, since in common usage ‘therapy’ is a service for health, it is a landscape that helps to recover an altered health, a lost balance, a holistic identity in crisis.

This fundamental dimension is significantly different from that of nineteenth-century medicine, which, in a melting pot of romanticism and positivism, gathers the classical tradition of health places. These are mostly places reputed to be healthy because they are sources of non-transportable therapeutic materials. Historically, they are waters or mud baths; in addition, the new discoveries of hygienism bring in vogue some properties for the airs of the most natural environments: mountain sanatoria, bathing establishments for their load of jodine, are added to the spas.

The sites where the elusive materials considered therapeutic are present become the seat of fictitious societies unconnected to ordinary time and known places. On the one hand, the typology of the ‘colonies’, with that slightly sadistic prescriptive component of ‘socially useful’ care, with its barrack-like collective behaviour, which erodes all playfulness and enjoyment. On the other hand, the typology of spas, with the idleness away from home that only has precedents in the suspended and mundane climate of the Italian Journey of the Central European or Anglo-Saxon aristocrats.

In the fin de siecle splendours, ‘passing the baths’ indicates more a time than a space, a way of performing societal rituals to which the places are adapted, reproducing simulacra of fantastic cities and dreamy gardens in countryside that is mostly muddy, smelly and not very fascinating, if we except for the frequent archaeological traces of those who preceded these therapeutic practices by a couple of millennia.

The landscape of the thermal baths, like that of the colonies and sanatoria, is mostly invented, extraneous to the surrounding area, indeed constructed in such a way as to make the sense of the internal places less communicative than the external ones.

It is a foundation landscape like the provincial Roman urbs, like today’s tourist villages. It has the general characteristics that Augè defines as the property of non-places, that is, of significant environments that assume their sense, albeit powerful and widely recognised, within a delocalised network of references. Indeed, as with the non-places of the modern studied by Augè, it is important that the sense of the ‘instructions for use’ derived from those complexes is typological and not individual, that it refers to the baths in their generality and not to those of Marienbad or Aix-le-Bain. In fact, if we take our cue from literature and the images that figurative art and cinema refer us to, spas in the past couple of centuries performed a service, even more than for health, for social identity: facilitating the self-recognition of an upper-class and aristocratic society.

The health therapy of the waters thus becomes a pretext for identifying appointments of a society that, overflowing from the cities and even the countries of origin, begins to become widely international. And for this it requires securitising networks, spaces in which it is easy to recognise similar rules and codified behaviour for all those who frequent them, with uniform rituals and liturgies generalised throughout Europe: as with music temples, transatlantic liners and monumental cemeteries.

Even more abstract from places is the type of ‘colony’ and ‘sanatorium’, physically immersed in ‘healthy’ space (the mountain forest, the seashore) but in fact detached from the overall landscape, from relations with the inhabitants: a built complex with its enclosure cut off from the rest. Here too the term ‘colony’ echoes separations, closed insulae incommunicating with the surroundings: the opposite of landscape in the sense we attribute to it according to the European Convention.

So it is not really a therapeutic landscape that is enjoyed at the immovable ‘therapeutic materials’ and their ‘productive settlements’.

If we take the landscape back to its overall dimension, interactive with the places and culture of the inhabitants and users, the field of reflection on the adjective ‘therapeutic’ becomes more complex and intriguing.

Therapy carries with it a concept of health, which is well suited, if we refer to the initial etymology, to a holistic, integral relationship of each with the landscape.

But in what dynamics of our inner balance does the landscape relationship flow? We have tried to summarise them in three actions: inhabiting, exploring, contemplating.

We have also hypothesised that each person can achieve the integration of ‘landscape well-being’ only by satisfying the requirements of all three actions, in times and spaces that may differ, but in any case in a cocktail, even if the proportions between the three parts vary according to cultural and sentimental biographies and personal situations.

Therefore, at a naive assessment, which begs psychologists and anthropologists’ pardon for their amateurishness, one might say that the therapeutic landscape is the one that reintegrates each person’s wellbeing, altered and decomposed by the unsatisfied demand for a landscape to inhabit, or to explore, or to contemplate.

Obviously, it is not a question of places but of their characters, of immaterial therapeutic properties that, appropriately composed in a ‘landscape preparation’ to be slowly assumed throughout one’s life, can cure the discomforts of ‘sickness of living’.

Therapeutic landscapes to remedy homesickness

‘To inhabit, is to feel at home, hosted by a space that does not ignore us, among the things that tell of our experience, among faces that we do not need to recognise because in their gaze are the traces of our last leave-taking.’

Umberto Galimberti, 1994.

‘I wish there were places that were stable, immobile, intangible, never touched and almost untouchable, unchanging, rooted; places that would be points of reference and departure, sources:

My hometown, the cradle of my family, the house where I would have been born, the tree I would have seen grow (which my father would have planted on the day of my birth), the attic of my childhood crammed with intact memories…

Such places do not exist, and it is because they do not exist that space becomes problematic, ceases to be evidence, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be appropriate. Space is a doubt: I must continually locate it, designate it. It is never mine, it is never given to me, I must conquer it.’

Georges Perec, 1973.

Both Perec and Galimberti speak of home, the one known first, the one that Bachelard already in the 1950s placed at the centre of his ‘poetics of space’. They speak of a lack, which is perhaps the original aporia, our fundamental malaise of the modern and the uprooted.

Urbanity, mobility, and globalisation have ploughed with a deep ploughshare the consolidated soil on which the references of an entire civilisation had grown still, which had ploughed mountains and deserts in order to settle down, to put down roots, to exorcise death thinking that children and grandchildren will see the same land that their fathers saw.

Against the malaise of existential homesickness, the fundamental therapeutic tool is the permanence of familiar landscapes, the making of Ulysses recognise his Ithaca.

It should be noted that in the poem Ulysses does not immediately recognise the shores of his stony island, nor is he recognised by those who stood there. Because he had left the landscape, he had not changed with them. What is missing is the holistic and vital synthesis, which does not need explicit and codified communication because communication occurs by internal and implicit means. Therefore, lacking uncoded meaning, there is a need for signs, there is a need for Athena to tell him

‘Here is the harbour of Forchis, of the old marine

Here at the head of the harbour is the leafy olive tree

And near here the lovely, dark cavern […],

yea, this is the vast, vaulted hollow, where thou didst often

did the nymphs welcome (xiii, 345-348)’

and the harbour, the olive tree and the vast expanse of land had been there waiting for him.

In the Odyssey, things had waited, men had not, and their death is the only possible restoration of the human landscape that Odysseus had expected for so long: mythical shock therapy.

What would have happened if the landscape of things had not waited? What would have been the therapy for ‘betrayal’? Would Ulysses, in front of the rebuilt harbour, the cut olive tree, the occluded spectacle, have had them rebuilt or would he have boarded the first ship, become the first modern hero, lost the native landscape? Perhaps from the Odyssey he would have jumped straight into the Divine Comedy, not as a sinner of pride, due to his existential restlessness, but as the archetypal victim of an exile from the landscape, so frequent in the modern, but then all the more tragic as he was expected and then disappointed.

In any case, the first therapeutic landscape is the one that lasts, that remains recognisable: the one that has a ‘sentimental sustainability’.

Of course, the therapeutic durability of the landscape is not a character of stone, it does not refer to things but to the relationships that are progressively interwoven and gradually established with things, and that last because they co-evolve, absorbing the changes of the vital seasons of one and the other, of man and the environment.

 

But in the myth of the hero who built his own context, who made a palace out of the nuptial bed and a landscape out of a safe roadstead, an olive tree to mark it and a cave friendly to the local gods, there is also another essential source of the well-being of living: one appropriates the landscape.

I believe that this ‘appropriation’ corresponds to the process of ‘construction’ that Heidegger talks about, placing it in parallel with living, and which we architects have so much squashed in favour of the physical activity of erecting walls and putting up roofs.

Physical building is a part, and not even the most important part, of this appropriation, which furthermore encompasses a broader and deeper work of cultural and psychological construction, with the progressive consolidation of recognitions and sympathies.

Along the Odyssey, the hero lands at a dozen beaches similar to the petrous Ithaca, he is a guest for months and years in friendly lands and people who would like to keep him, but he does not appropriate any place, just as he does not marry any woman. In the myth, we understand that realistically, the process of appropriating people and lands is a complex work, not very repeatable, which slowly and laboriously establishes systemic relationships of long duration. It is because of this labour of construction, which is done only once, establishing one’s own kingdom of island and wife, which he knows well and whose product he wants to regain, that Ulysses views change as betrayal.

I think that one of the malaises of our modern living is the pervasive sense of not having a homeland, of being guests in other people’s landscapes, and that this malaise is strongly aggravated by a sense of powerlessness, given by a loss of competence to ‘make the landscape our own’, to recognise olive trees that mark the route to the harbour, niches where we can gather in dialogue with local geniuses, to make beds and roofs for our offspring. Like Ulysses, we wander the world, but unlike Ulysses, we suffer from a deprivation: we do not have a firm grasp on the idea that we already have our own homeland, because we have not built it, we have not participated in establishing its essential landscape relations. Throughout the Odyssey, Ulysses expresses other resources, he is a modern man who invents and always gets away with it, but he is a hero precisely because of the almost ethical dimension, guiding in every situation, of being nevertheless king of an island, of mastering a landscape from which he departs and to which he returns, which occupies his memory and in any case assigns him an identity.

The latent power in the whole saga of wandering lies in knowing what it means to be, to have a homeland: it is a cultural competence that founds our civilisation: knowing how to inhabit, always having the cardinal points in mind…

In our time, this basic competence is weakening, we suffer a violent social breakdown between natives barricaded in inhospitable cities and stateless people besieging them, where everyone, however, suffers from the diminishing capacity to establish fruitful landscape relations and the lack of places of pacification.

The ancients invested a great deal of common resources to consolidate the koinè between men, also making substantial use of the landscape: the highest testimony is perhaps the Greek theatre, carved into the side of the slope facing the sea, which gathers the entire community, arouses it in rites of collective catharsis, keeping it immersed in a landscape that is engaging and intimate but also boundless and powerfully expansive.

For us therefore, who live in an era incapable of investing vital energies in new landscapes (and new koinè), the landscape where we still recognise these skills that derive from the ability and effort deposited to make friends with the genius loci is most therapeutic. These are places and communities where we believe we can re-learn some tricks of the trade of living:

– parts to be respected in their state, regardless (as Totò used to say), because they are essential for the lasting characterisation of entire places. These are the much-loved natural frames, of sea, forest or mountain, the panoramas that allow us to continuously perceive the ancient fascination of living on the edge of the uninhabitable, which should not be the prerogative of a privileged few, but, like the Greek theatre, a collective good that is ordinarily enjoyed,

– the minimum modifications to tame nature with care and rules to keep the relationship friendly despite our invasive intervention. The first rule of the paradise gardener is precisely that of keeping modifications to a minimum. Not only for an economy of resources and effort, as the ancients taught us, but for a sobriety of building, a measure that is implicit in the friendship we want to maintain with nature itself: relationships in which everyone knows their place last for a long time. Traces of these cultures of sobriety can be found in mountain resorts not overwhelmed by tourism or abandonment,

– the shrewdness of location; a now obsolete capacity for choice, the lack of which is the source of much of the malaise of modern living without friendship for place. The perfect morphogenesis of ‘human’ landscapes, triggered by ancient localisations, astonishes us today because we pretend not to know the complexity of this founding act of living that has always required the help of the gods or of nature. It requires an act of humility and a request for help beyond normal knowledge: it is an act that has always been connected to the relationship with the superhuman, but the traditional Chinese, more practical than us, who symbolise everything and consecrate our acts with simple liturgies without any real evidence, concretely resort to wild animals, which they chase until they choose where to sleep, to identify through their powerful instincts the best site for the foundation of new settlements. One can find traces of the ‘ordinary’ locational wisdom that has become a settlement model in landscapes that are now profoundly humanised, such as the Italian hillsides of Langa, Montefeltro or Chianti,

– the wise practices of ‘landscape homeopathy’, where small doses of substances similar to unbalancing poisons help metabolise the changes caused by them. These are the places where the new has been tackled while avoiding any subversion of the previous order, keeping the signs under the aegis of the more established landscape. Traces of these practices, attractive for their careful relationship with the rules of the context, can be found in the revitalised historic centres or in the tourist developments of a century ago, in some mountain resort sites,

– the function of explicit sign, comprehensible within an easy natural language, that artefacts must have, not in themselves, but according to the role they are intended to play in the landscape, starting from their location. To distinguish themselves as signs or vice versa, to stand out in the heap, without standing out; to bring closer or vice versa, to keep the inside separate from the outside (without the need for fences and fences, good only for animals): these are characters of sign appropriateness that decree the role and effective enjoyment of monuments, or simply of artefacts inserted in the context, beyond the photos in magazines and the architect’s signature.

It is therefore not just a matter of dealing with a lasting landscape, but of knowing how to maintain good relations with places in the long term, i.e. to actively participate in that process of co-evolutionary changes that settled communities have with their landscape, in the construction of what is necessary for their own development and enterprises. In our time, as we have seen, this balance is difficult to achieve: we seem incapable of an amicable and sustainable appropriation of relations with the territory.

The difficult coordination of the times and modes proper to places with those of the businesses of those who frequent them is one of the greatest sources of contradiction in modern living.

Modernity is in fact incapable of giving itself strategies of balance with the context, and conceives this relationship as inevitably dialectical and oppositional: the yardstick for evaluating the relationship between development and landscape is impact.

The contemporary landscape does not show signs of what would seem the obvious: a society that progresses, in the true sense of the term, can only improve the valorisation of its resources, and not diminish their effectiveness for its own well-being. On the contrary, the best landscapes are not, for us moderns, those rich in the signs of modernity, but on the contrary, the landscapes of more ancient signs, where time confirms a well-established pacification, help us. In pursuing those landscapes of remote imprint, which help us to feel good, it is as if we had given up and said: we don’t know how to do it, we have to get help, resorting to an income to be exploited, to the use of the past labours of our ancestors that benevolently bear fruit in lasting equilibrium.

Conversely, in the territory that does not bear the signs of a pacified landscape, that keeps open the contrast between development and identity, a deep malaise is widespread. The residents of the gigantic sphere of suburbia, not city and not countryside, that now covers our metropolitan regions suffer. They are millions who stay in places they neither built nor wanted, who receive neither pleasure nor sociality from them.

In these conditions, everyone resorts to individual remedies, and these structurally worsen the collective malaise: we move away from these plagues as soon as possible, we fill the streets with cars and empty the pavements, we only stop in closed sites or live nocturnal lives, because we are now deprived of a sense of landscape to satisfy: it is no longer to the landscape that we entrust our collective identity.

A punitive and guilt-ridden interpretation of this state of malaise points to man’s desire for development as a sin in itself, as the source of the inevitable contrast with the enduring landscape (with Nature, as environmentalists hastily put it).

But the history of our civilisation leads us to believe that a path of development that is also a valorisation of the landscape is possible: if we search our lands for traces of a balance managed for centuries by men less powerful and less cultured than our contemporaries, it is because, all the more reason for us to think we can find it again in our time.

We certainly lack a good diagnostician, one that specifies the conditions of our evil today, but we do know what the ancients cared for, we at least know that their landscapes were a place of positive convergence of the needs of development and those of identity.

We know, for example, that the landscapes that ‘cure’ this malaise are living, social landscapes, tingling with activity and construction, involving the surroundings, imagined rather in Lorenzetti’s Good Government than in De Chirico’s metaphysical porticoes. They are positive relationships that collectively entertain themselves with places, aided

– by a common and consolidated model of perception, which helps to observe the implicit rules for their effective maintenance,

– by a competence of builders to increase and not reduce the value of the landscape in which they intervene.

These are landscapes woven into territories, in other words, where there is no question as to whether it is legitimate to compress design freedom by dictating regulations with rules for building well; where it is clear to everyone that the ridges called Bellosguardo are not only prized viewpoints but are also so called for being admired panoramas; where the normal product of and for work is only considered valid if it serves to make one feel good even during the period of rest, as is the case with well-cultivated fields and well-built cities, where the architect is happy to live in the house he designs.

If we find traces of these Lost Paradise behaviours only in static communities, which have suffered less from the bullying of modernity, this does not mean a passatist choice, aimed at irreproducible Shangri-las, in extinction in our time.

On the contrary, we believe that a modern model of healthy living is possible, one that asserts itself in the same way as it did for the care of the body. For the body, after centuries of inability to redeem itself from malaise, the culture of the new generations, having emerged from atavistic hunger and material deficiencies, tends to give importance to metabolic balances. As with the devotees of health behaviours, so the new landscape behaviours are appropriate, sober, respectful of places. Today, only a few choose them, but soon we will all be forced into them, willingly or unwillingly, by the reduction of resources and the energy and environmental unsustainability of our way of life. However, it is important to make sense of these behaviours not as a penitence of fasting but as a therapeutic model, soothing deep-seated ailments and introducing an easier and less tiring relationship between each inhabitant of the earth and the context of his or her life.

Therapeutic landscapes to give rise to the search for something else

Recognising ourselves in lasting places made ‘ours’ with conscious work and maintenance effort satisfies the desire for protection, the basic postulate of living. But in the myth of Ulysses, a balance and ‘holistic’ health is described, achieved only in the hero’s life as a whole, for whom pacified dwelling constitutes the warrior’s rest, conquered starting from an original capacity to appropriate the landscape, but then achieved through a long process of return, from places other than dwelling. The landscape of the return to Ithaca is not enough in itself to explain the power of the myth. For the protagonist’s completeness, however, the first instalment is missing: the Iliad, the epic of setting out on a war journey, is missing. What is missing for us is the landscape that satisfies mobility, that gives scope to the restlessness of our being citizens of the world.

In any case, for Ulysses as for us, reassurance is only one side of the coin of inhabiting the world, which bears on the other side exploration: a word whose etymon has imprinted on it the sense of flowing, of flowing aimlessly, outside.

Bachelard, after many intense chapters centred on the House, dedicates an entire chapter of his Poetics of Space to the ‘dialectic of outside and inside’, highlighting the symbolic complexity of the theme of borders, of the door and ultimately, of the relationship with the Other than oneself.

The need to confront the Other from oneself is identified by psychologists as the puissant force of the child’s growth, the motor of his taking his place in the world. Piaget recognises this elementary drive as a fundamental relation in the very structure of the psychological relationship with space.

On the other hand, curiosity is the most organic instrument of the ‘Peter Pan strategy’, that psychological condition that Carotenuto places among the basic ingredients of psychic well-being at any age.

Driven by the same urge, billions of people in the post-rural era feel the personal and social need to know something other than their own landscape, to culturally assault places and codes other than those they know, and a few hundred million of the most fortunate devote their resources of time and money to ‘cultural tourism’, which is then an adult form of the childish and adolescent exploration, of the Peter Pan we cultivate within ourselves.

In this way, one responds to a deep need, not elementary but evolved and complex, to which one devotes considerable investment and the most valuable part of one’s time, the time chosen as ‘free’. Sociologists devote little attention to this aspect of modern quality of life, which is often underestimated in welfare policies because it does not involve matters of life and death, nor remedies for acute and concentrated discomforts. But in fact it is such a relevant phenomenon that when the German government, in times of lean national economies, invites its electorate to cut back on holidays abroad, it provokes much more protest than when it raises taxes.

Certainly not all holidays are desired to satisfy the need for exploration: a considerable proportion of travel must be interpreted as a remedy for homesickness, the product of escape from the deprived landscape of the skyless and natureless suburbs, from the feeling of belonging to a foggy Truman show. In any case, the therapy for these needs lies not only in the journey, in the yearning for physical wellbeing and contact with the natural elements, but also in the search for alternatives to the banal, in grappling with the unusual, in trying one’s hand at the unexpected, in attempting to master non-predetermined spaces and relationships.

In exploration, much more than in the practices of everyday living, we pay attention to aspects that are normally overlooked, we translate into thought factors of meaning that we normally perceive without reflection, we sediment in our memory most of the images that then become our personal atlases. Even some, such as Quaini and Raffestin, each in their own way, argue that landscape consists precisely in this process of attention, in which the desire for knowledge, once consumed in deposited experiences, is metabolised in the representations of memory and progressively in socially shared images.

What are the landscapes for the explorer? The great explorers, in their descriptive practice of uncovering unknown pieces of the world, began the erosion of the boundless field of geographical curiosity, of wonder, which perhaps today appears to be reduced to zero in our world of omnivorous communication.

But the desire for exploration continually reopens itself on the same sites just ordered and made known by others. The world is the location, but the action is all personal, and it is backed by curiosity: one can elect as places of wonder and interest territories just beyond one’s front door. Not only the landscapes sought by Captain Cook or Dr Livingstone are useful, but also those of Hukler Finn and George Perec. Certainly all explorers, characters or people that they are, need some elusive substance of the landscape, niches, shadows that arouse interest and curiosity in them, only in them. Exploration is a solitary experience, enjoying the exclusive tête à tête with the less polite and transparent part of the world, discovering the covered, re-evaluating the neglected, bringing to light the forgotten.

Farinelli argues, moreover, that it is the nature of the landscape itself that is resilient, the residue that remains infinitely, in what is not reproduced in the map that the last explorer drew up, and is therefore always available for discovery and exploration.

On the other hand, exploration is most fruitful, for personal well-being, when it turns to unknown aspects of ‘one’s’ territory: when they occur, as Saramago says in Journey to Portugal (quoted by Quaini in Shadow of the Landscape):

‘… emotion and adaptation, recognition and discovery, confirmation and surprise. The traveller has travelled within his own country. Which means he has travelled within himself, to the culture that has educated him and is educating him…..’

In short, exploration is an act of conquering the world, which makes us feel good if we reacquaint ourselves with its features as those of ‘our’ landscape, something that is added to and fits like a jigsaw puzzle piece into the memorial construction that represents our identity.

For the pure explorer, who measures himself against a world truly other than his own, the interlocking of the unknown perceptions with his own history is predominantly methodological: it succeeds in particular for the Enlightenment person who, strengthened by reason educated in enquiry, describes the unknown world by naming it, like a new Adam. Humboldt’s Chimborazo tables are the most splendid example of the exercise of recomposing the world according to the ordering force of Western thought, tonic and reconstituent for the dominant model of development for the next two centuries (as Farinelli often emphasises).

A serious reflection on the culture of landscape to be resurfaced, to be rediscovered because it is already implicit in our cultural base, of environmentally unhinged Europeans, could even be therapeutic not only for personal well-being but for that of an entire civilisation, grappling with a love-hate syndrome with mother-nature, in which we pretend not to know where we come from. This is what Simon Shama argues in the introduction to his masterful essay: ‘’Landscape and Memory’ would like to be precisely a way of seeing, of rediscovering what we already possess but which in a certain sense eludes our gaze and our understanding. Instead of an umpteenth explanation of what we have lost, it is an investigation of what we can still find‘.

So the exploratory attitude finds in landscapes the most fertile ground for its curiosity, and in apparently domestic territories matter for landscapes to be rediscovered, following a difficult, elitist track, but one of great relevance for personal equilibrium and for the cultural richness of one’s time.

For those who believe they make places by trade (which, as we know, they make themselves, but we architects pretend to be the authors of them), it is a challenge to design spaces for exploration, situations in which it is easier to satisfy that desire for the ‘other’ landscape that drives us to be born around.

The difficulties come on the one hand from the very subject matter that arouses curiosity, from the complexity of impossible city and territory design that stimulates exploration. On the other hand, there is the difficult education of the gaze, the increasingly less spontaneous ‘competence to explore’, the historical virtuous tool of the West, which is becoming blunt in our time.

So we must make cities and places to re-awaken the desire to explore. We need to go back up the slope of a few generations of planners directed towards producing safe, functional cities, albeit uninviting, boring, devoid of signs except in the designated places: scorched earth for explorers.

In order to facilitate landscapes of exploration, one must dedicate the project to lightening its own weight, the definitiveness of its sign, one must leave room for the casual deposit, the undesigned residue, the slow evolution, the accumulation of new senses and meanings in the ‘porous’ system of the marginal landscape. And on the other hand, we must all re-educate ourselves to adventure, to non-standardised behaviour, to children with truly free time and space, and to grandchildren increasingly capable of understanding and enjoying the world directly, without intermediaries.

Some hints are already present in the debate on the city and open spaces and in recent fairly widespread experiences, which could foster a new respect for landscapes of exploration, urban and otherwise:

– taking into account, in their paradoxical ‘integrity’, the marginal strips of the city and infrastructure, the disused places, the undesigned edges, the places where the times of nature slowly take over, to which Gilles Clément dedicates his Manifesto of the Third Landscape,
– to return the city and its surroundings to children, but not so much to make it a secure and controlled nest (this would be handing the city over to the anxieties of parents), as to make it the place of discovery and the field of exploration from the earliest years, as has long been the case in experiences in many European localities, on the basis of strategic frameworks such as that of Francesco Tonucci

– favouring the behaviours and spaces of unexpected encounters, of serendipity, starting from the city, as outlined by Arnaldo Bagnasco, but also placed at the centre of a real manifesto for a Serendicity by Antida Gazzola
– to defend the diversity of the landscape, of the territorial offer and of the complexity of views, not only as a result of the richness of the ecosystem and historical testimony, but as a plurality of cultural resources operating, as an open yard of interpretations and uses, in which the lively and multicultural activities and behaviour of operators and users constitute a part of the valuable landscape (like the market square of Marrakech, a Unesco heritage site for its activities, or as most of our Mediterranean cities were until a few decades ago for northern European visitors).

These are all strategic lines to be worked out, to be poured into the landscape, which in any case come from the insights of psychologists, sociologists, ecologists. They are perspectives that present an advanced form of demand, with respect to which the supply of architects and planners appears self-referential and very inadequate, the victim of ideologies of the built, of the definitive, and of caste superstitions that prevent us from listening to appeals to the modesty of the project, to the maintenance of spaces for the indefinite. It is continually suggested to us that the real foundation stone of ‘domestic’ exploration is never laid in a project but must be found, discovered by chance, behind the designed spaces.

Therapeutic landscapes to lose oneself in contemplation

When Gogol was ill in 1842, he wrote to a friend: ‘… I can hardly wait for spring to come, and the time to return to my Rome… So come once, even if it is at the sunset of your days, to Rome, to my tomb, if I am no longer among the living. God, what a land! What a land of wonders! What refreshment it gives to thy soul!‘.

Two years earlier, he had written a short story, entitled ‘Novella italiana’, and then ‘Annunziata’, and then ‘Roma’ (a true ‘landscape’ writing, dense with passion for places and their aura).

The story tells of a restless young Roman prince who is sent to grow up around Italy and in Paris, returns as a 25-year-old to reconquer his city and is thunderstruck by the beauty of a girl, Annunziata, seen in the street. He frantically searches for her, wandering around and increasingly altered, accompanied by a servant whom he is about to ask to help him pick up her trail, when he raises his head and from the small square of S. Pietro in Montorio he looks: ‘The sun was bowing towards the earth, its ray had become more vermilion and warmer over the whole architectural mass; the city more vivid and closer; the pines became blacker; the mountains bluer and more phosphorescent; the air, close to extinction, more beautiful and solemn. God, what a sight! The prince, fascinated, forgot himself and the beauty of Annunziata, and the mysterious destiny of his people, and all that exists in the world.‘ The end.

Beyond all certainty of dwelling and all yearning to explore and conquer places and people lies forgetting oneself and one’s anxieties. This is what the Orientals have always told us; for them these are rules of life, daily practices. But for us, sufferers of insecurity and aggression, ad hoc remedies and cures are needed: special therapeutic landscapes, to which we can resort in the most desperate moments, when our contradictions become more nagging.

It is somewhat surprising that Italian law speaks of landscape for the first time precisely in order to ensure some place that brings this kind of salutary emotion: the laws of 1939 thought of heritage protection for cultural assets, for the social need to consolidate testimonies, but thought of landscape as safeguarding the right to contemplation, a luxurious salutary practice of one’s own sensitivity that Italians can afford, having thousands of city skylines, sunsets, mountain and woodland profiles that leave everyone speechless.

The protection of contemplation, however, stops here: those who are capable of losing themselves in the pleasure of the landscape should enjoy it, the authority seems to say, I only guarantee the survival of the point of view, of the local situation that can trigger that difficult psychological event.

I think we have to go a little further, we have to understand what effects foster the sense of contemplation, forgetting oneself and others. What factors trigger being lost, at least with respect to our own histories and contexts, so that this does not have negative effects, of dismay and anxiety, but is rather a positive, therapeutic sense of measure of the inanity of our anxieties.

It is certainly partly a cultural factor: one learns to lose oneself in front of a landscape, just as one learns not to hold back one’s fears and anxieties in front of a friend or a psychoanalyst.

Some respectable teachers have thought of this: Wittgenstein for example

I show my students fragments of a boundless landscape, where it is impossible for them to find their way around,

or, in a more thoughtful and organic way, Celati:

Every observation needs to free itself from the familiar codes it carries, needs to drift amidst all that it does not understand, in order to arrive at a mouth, where it must feel lost.

In any case, the onlooker is asked to surrender to complexity: Paul Klee, in the margin of his last drawing, writes:

Must everything be known? Ah, I do not think so.

Leopardi tries, in the months around the emotion of the Infinite, to give a psychological explanation, in a note on the Zibaldone:

The feeling that one feels at the sight of a countryside or of anything else that inspires you with vague and indefinite ideas and thoughts, however delightful, is still like a delight that cannot be grasped, and can be compared to that of running after a beautiful and painted butterfly without being able to catch it: And therefore it always leaves a great desire in the soul: yet this is the supreme of our delights, and everything that is determined and certain is much further from satisfying us than this which by its uncertainty can never satisfy us.

More rhetorically, but aware of the emotional process that requires great psychological readiness Baudelaire and Friedrich, unaware of each other, write, the former:

‘Before the landscape the eyes of the soul catch what the eyes cannot catch’. The other:

‘Close your physical eye so that you see the image primarily with the eye of the spirit’.

So the therapy of contemplation is facilitated by the experience of the landscape that makes it possible to endure and indeed become strong in uncertainty, detachment, distance. It is a magical suspension of the cognitive process to make possible another type of experience in landscapes that become abstract, of impossible communication, landscapes whose map is still that of the sea that Carroll made for Alice: a blank sheet of paper.

Keeping in mind that getting lost is a therapy, but like every strong experience it also generates the ultimate malady: it is the nostalgia of getting lost, it is the wet eye of the old man who stood still on a pier in Sestri looking at a winter sea and when I boy asked why he was crying I was told ninte, ninte, u l’ha u maa daa maina.

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