The human act of generating new ecological and territorial orders is generally associated with man’s quest to imprint his mark on nature, to generate semiotic effects. In this sense, landscape is the result, perceived perceptually, of a self-reflexive moment of human action in nature, finding its justification in the diversity of human societies. Understood in this way, landscape becomes man’s search for himself, an exquisitely cultural act, distinct therefore from brute, unreflective, purely animal action.

A specific semiology of landscape can only be proposed starting from a precise anthropological datum: the human act of generating new ecological and territorial orders is generally associated with man’s quest to imprint his mark on nature, to generate semiotic effects. This entails a redefinition of the concept of landscape, which should be understood as the result, perceived perceptually, of a self-reflexive moment of human action in nature, finding its justification in the diversity of human societies. Understood in this way, landscape becomes man’s search for himself, an exquisitely cultural act, distinct therefore from brute, unreflective, purely animal action.

With these premises, the semiology of the landscape should essentially concern the landscape of others: more difficult, however, would be to justify a semiology of the landscape of which we are authors and actors in the first person, since, in this case, the content (the meaning) of the signs we introduce into the pre-existing order should depend on us, even though we know that generally the first, original meanings are superseded by the normalisation of territorial uses (U.Eco).

Apart from this, there is for everyone a semiotic moment in acting, as there are always territorial pre-existences that we have to interpret in order to link them to our interventions, although natural ones are one thing and anthropic-cultural ones another. In this sense, two levels or semiotic moments can be recognised: those who read a landscape on which they must   act, and those who read the landscape   acted upon, transformed after its reading and the modifying action that follows.

The reading of the landscape of others consists in the recognition of different categories of signs (meaning, of course, also territorial objects not inserted in a communicative function, but insofar as they enter into social communication and insofar as they are integrated in a sign context) linked to each other in syntagmatic ways, which refer to the different activities carried out on the territory by a society. Signs, therefore, as parts of a discourse that is then the territorial (or regional) organisation that expresses itself or can express itself in the so-called ‘landscape units’, rightly sought after by town planners and planners.

The ways in which organisation takes place depend on the societies, their internal mechanisms, the natural environment in which they operate (Emilia has yellow brick buildings, Lombardy red brick), their particular way of producing, of using energy and other resources found in nature, of expressing religiosity, playfulness, aesthetic taste, social relations, etc., in a word, of expressing their cultural identity.

This tells us of the complexity of the landscape and the complexity of a system of signification that wants to interpret it, to read it as a system of signs; it also tells us how complexity is overcome by matching a categorical order of signs with an order of motivations that refer us back to the internal structures of society, whereby each society corresponds to a certain landscape and a certain type of signs, that is, a certain langue. The correspondence between social and territorial structures is clear, due to the elementary nature of the sign dictate, in ethnographic or pre-modern societies; it is not so in more evolved, more complex societies. So much so that today we regret the Marxian classifications based on ‘modes of production’, which simplified the identification of societies and thus allowed an easy and direct reading of the landscapes they produced. In fact, it is one thing to take into account economic factors, with their laws that are expressed in the landscape according to precise rules, and another to take into account those incalculable factors that are the sentiment of the sacred, social conventions, recreational and aesthetic needs, etc.

The complexity of the landscape increases even further if one adds to the signs of the societies operating in a certain area the historical sedimentations linked to the different generations and societies that have operated in that same area, which broadens the semantic spectrum in boundless ways. In reality, there are different levels of signification, because there are different orders of situations, of histories, of information that can be grasped. Diversity which, according to the more general classification on which semioticians operate, can be put into two broad categories, that which refers to a dictionary and classificatory knowledge of the first degree, and that which concerns an encyclopaedic knowledge,   broader, rich in cross-references and specifications of a different order. But it is a classification that helps landscape semiologists little, in my opinion. It is as if of a dwelling house one showed only the entrance, sufficient to say that it is a dwelling house, but not all the rest, the most.

In this regard, U. Eco in his recent book Kant and the Platypus gives the example, very fitting for us who are interested in landscape, of Ayers Rock. He tells us, as a semiologist unaccustomed to reasoning about geographical objects, but very sharp in theorising on semiotic themes, that dictionaries can provide information that makes Ayers Rock fall into the category (the TC or Cognitive Type) of mountains; but that it can also not be considered a mountain as we usually understand it, given that it stands in the middle of a plain in an atypical and curious way. He adds that, from a scientific point of view, it may not be classified as a mountain because it looks like ‘a stone, a single rock, a monolith embedded in the ground, as if a giant had hurled it from the sky. “Ayers Rock,” he concludes, “is a mountain from the point of view of Cognitive Type, but it is not a mountain from the point of view of Molecular Content (CM), i.e., petrological or lithological expertise as it may be.”

The difference between Nuclear Content and Molar Content, between dictionary knowledge and encyclopaedic knowledge is profound, even if, as Eco makes us understand, the boundary between the two fields of knowledge is anything but rigid, and there is indeed a continuous shift from one field to the other. The encyclopaedic knowledge to which geography refers in order to recognise the diversity and specificity of places is boundless, corresponding to the entire knowledge of the world (C. Socco rightly speaks of an encyclopaedic atlas). From it, then, we can derive the information to give a sense, a meaning to landscapes such as the one dominated by Ayers Rock. But what information do we need to transcend? Can those translatable into cartography, which is commonly regarded as the proper language of geography, be sufficient? Town planners generally think that this is enough, but we know that cartography, on the other hand, can only provide us with a few indications regarding the landscape, as it refers to a few categories of signs and thus to dictionary-type knowledge, even if thematic cartographies seem to be able to broaden the encyclopaedic range and thus overcome the limitations inherent in cartographic language. Not even the encyclopaedic knowledge that geography resorts to outside cartographic and dictionary knowledge can solve the problem of the semiological reading of the landscape if it is not used properly, because as it is usually taken from geography it only fattens semiosis by bulimia, without telling us anything about the landscape, at least on the basis of the premises we made at the beginning about the sense and purpose of the semiology of the landscape (what do we want to know when we look at Ayers Rock? What does that mysterious cliff tell us?).

So when geographers tell us about Ayers Rock, in order to have their say and expand the encyclopaedic account of the great cliff, they have to resort to the knowledge of geologists and geomorphologists, for whom Ayers Rock is simply a relief (not really a mountain, Eco is right) that belongs to the category of the Inselbergen, the island-mountains, relicts of ancient reliefs that remain as witnesses in the peneplains, the levelling surfaces of mountainous territories. A remnant therefore of now-demolished mountains, made of Palaeozoic sandstones, which tells us the geological history of a region of Australia. And here we could go on, delving into the narrative deposits of encyclopaedic knowledge, reaching deeper and deeper semantic levels, telling the story of that region’s links with the geosyncline of Tasmania, etc.

But is this what we ask of semiology? Certainly not, since these are questions concerning mechanisms whose study we can peacefully leave to physical geography. Different is the task of semiology, which must seek, in the face of a natural landscape such as Ayers Rock, not yet anthropised (?), how man has established a relationship with it, how he has annexed it to his culture, how he has found himself reflected in it, as a man and as a member of a society. Now, the starting point for such a semiological examination is the perception of the landscape, how it imposes itself on the gaze with its different elements, its different forms. To the perception, Ayers Rock presents itself with the characteristic appearance of relict reliefs in arid or semi-arid environments, with the rock surfaces modelled by the action of the wind, which has created hollows that give the impression of an ancient, worn-out stone, similar to an old, moth-eaten wood. These manifestations of antiquity, of archaism, certainly did not escape the notice of the first Aboriginal people who saw Ayers Rock, just as they do not escape the notice of today’s visitors, who are moved by the majesty of the Australian relief, perceiving, also through the scenographic suggestion (Ayers Rock is magically tinged red at dawn and sunset), the singularity and antiquity of the rock, the mystery of time, a first idea, a first hierophany of the mysteries of nature. It is, in short, the archetypal, original, primordial relationship, and yet so decisive for our moving through the world, that which makes MerleauPonty say that a single such element is enough to make us understand the truth and complexity of the world, just as a single word is enough to reveal to us an entire discourse.

But how do we get   to understand the hierophantic vision of the Aborigines and give such content to the great rock? A first indication may come from the rock histories, and then others from the fact that Ayers Rock is remembered in the mythical celebrations of the founder-heroes who, in remote times, moving far and wide across the continent, explored and came to know the world, annexing to their culture the vital territories (territories for hunting and gathering) of which the Inselbergen, like Ayers Rock, constituted the first references, the mythical-memorial stations par excellence, like the monumental cities of our history. That is, the annexation to the culture of a numinous presence such as Ayers Rock is resolved by linking it to the deeds of mythical ancestors, which is a way of introducing territorial elements into the Logos, producing landscape (C. LéviStrauss).

If we neglect this knowledge that, through myth, the aborigines had of Ayers Rock, we would reduce our semiology to a single category, the geological-morphological one, neglecting the geography of experience, on which anthropologists, the authors of the chapter in that vast encyclopaedia that contains all the world’s stories, can inform us. Including that of the isolated fortresses in the plains, which arouse an emotion that we can relive today, providing us with the cue to analyse our emotions, almost psychoanalysing ourselves, that is, investigating into the deepest and most primordial of our memorial and sentimental deposits that landscapes reawaken.

It is precisely for this reason that even such a particular semiosis can be reduced to the dictionary dimension, that which concerns man’s more general way of behaving in nature, because we know that the Inselbergen not only in Australia but also in Africa and Asia aroused in man the same emotions and the same sense of the sacred, as testified by the rock engravings, legends and rituals that are linked to these isolated and ancient reliefs, first-order references of geography and first elements of a knowledge of the world, of an early semiology, pre-categorical, pre-dictionary. But let us come to the present day, to the crowds of tourists visiting that monument of stone planted in the flat surface of the Amadeus Basin, to whom the brochures tell of the legend of the giant who hurled the enormous boulder from the sky, simplifying and bringing up to date an episode that has its reasons in a geological and anthropological history that, if one knows it, is certainly more fascinating than all the others. It is an example, if we want to stay in the language of semiologists, of fission, of a rupture or impoverishment of the original semiosis with respect to the banally encyclopaedic semiosis widespread in our society of tourism and entertainment, and of which even our architects and town planners are somewhat victims. Can the architect of today, subjected to the utilitarian drives of our world, pause to listen to the silence of Ayers Rock, its mysterious Palaeozoic emanations? Is knowledge of how the earliest myths and systems of signification came into being important? Different answers can be given to this question, but certainly the knowledge of those first meanings should be at the basis of all forms of knowledge because the first imprints that man gave to the earth’s landscape are linked to them, through the first cultural forms of use of space that underlie the diversity of landscapes. In any case, that pre-categorical knowledge that allowed those men to annex nature and territorial objects is semiotically ambiguous, vague, indefinite, i.e. not very dictionary, just as the knowledge of poets and artists is ambiguous, vague, indefinite, from whom, as U. Eco says, we cannot expect to recognise the diversity of landscapes.Eco says, we cannot expect the recognition of a nuclear content from them, but they are nevertheless important for their ability to renew our relationship with the world every time, to reinvigorate it with new meanings, in the very sense theorised by Russian formalism. With the example introduced by Eco, reference is made to a natural landscape that refers to the universe of original semiosis. It seems to me that it is important to now introduce an example concerning an anthropic landscape, a constructed landscape, and to see how we can organise a system of signification that allows us to find, if there are any, rules of interpretation, not neglecting, even this time, the contents linked to the populations that first operated on a semiotic basis in that landscape.

I will refer to an example that has been used by geography to show the richness and acuity of the tools at its disposal. It is an example relating to the motivations behind the perched centres, the high centres, that give such a characteristic imprint to the Italian landscape, of which they represent one of the main iconemes (leitmotif or characteristic image) that leap to the eyes of foreigners. According to P. Gribaudi, a geographer of the first half-century generation, committed to avoiding any trivialisation of geography, defensive reasons (the most obvious of readings) are not enough to explain such settlements. Instead, resorting to the scientific rigour of geography, the reasons would lie in the fact that only on the tops of the heights is the land protected from the erosion that usually erodes the slopes. This is a good reason that can certainly be valid for the centres of the Monferrato and other cases, but that cannot be sustained in the same way for other regional contexts, such as the centres that are located above the malarial plains of the Maremma or Basilicata. We can therefore say that there are different categories of perched centres, like different species of the same botanical family, each of which contributes to qualifying a region (here is an example that justifies the invoked ‘landscape unity’). But the reasons may not emerge as clearly as one thinks, because the principle of causality does not always emerge clearly in the perceived landscape.

Let us suppose the now frequent case in which the plains below the high centres have been reclaimed: how can we recognise a causal relationship like that? It would have to be sought by leafing through the historical encyclopaedia and recovering a past that is not visible in the landscape except behind its bark, just as the appearance of a plant is hidden beneath the bark of its trunk. Let us say, then, that through the signs of the landscape (the recognition of which pertains to the outsiders, the observers of other people’s landscapes) one cannot arrive at the life behind the landscape, if not through a search for historical, diachronic motivations, therefore with incursions into the reality that is expressed in the landscape, but that the landscape, a deceiver very often, cannot tell us exactly. Moreover, the history of the perched centres of the South and the readings that have been made of them show how wide the spectrum of possible meanings is. Let us remember that for Carlo Levi those centres remained as they were centuries and centuries ago because Christ, that is progress, had stopped at Eboli, while for the American sociologist P. Banfield everything could be explained by the fact that the inhabitants never committed themselves to going down and facing History in a compact and united manner.

How can one read landscapes if one does not know the society that produced them? Is it enough for us, in order to get to know China, to travel the length and breadth of the country without getting information from the Chinese themselves about the meaning of their works, bearing in mind that they often give opposite meanings to things and gestures equal to ours? We will only have collections of landscapes that differ from other landscapes but we will know nothing about the content that the Chinese gave to the elements that make up their landscape. In short, we will know the landscape as a collection of forms but we will not know the Chinese, the silent world of signs but not the noise of words. The semiology of landscape passes inextricably through the semiology of language, through the myths, beliefs, and stories it expressed.

So what are we to make of the landscape as a category of knowledge of the world, as a sign manifestation of the different territories in which it is configured? Can we reduce it to pure scenography by excluding the actors that move within it? Should we leave it in the hands of architects, town planners, agricultural technicians, engineers? To their utilitarian calculations? Excluding historians, sociologists, poets, griots, artists, priests? Landscape acquires meaning if we link it to the society that produces it, to its internal metabolisms, to the dialogue or conflicts that take place between technicians and poets, between engineers and artists. From this point of view, landscape itself is not polysemic, it is not polysemic anyway if we take it as a starting point to investigate. Starting from the perceptive datum, from its component signs, the iconemes as I call them, which are incontrovertible data of perception (as an enquiry between people travelling along the same travel route may reveal), the starting data of the semiotic operation that will lead us, at different levels, to recognise a territory or a region, the internal relations between the various elements (which can be translated into signs) that ensure its functioning and existence and on which the planner’s priority interest should therefore focus. By iconemes I mean the peculiar, emergent, distinctive, identity signs of regional spaces (or landscape units), representative parts or synecdoche that refer to the langue of a society, to its territorial organisation, as passages of a discourse that can be read at different levels of depth, going from the dictionary to the encyclopaedia. In this one will find the reasons of the insider, that is, of those who live in the territory, which we have recognised as fundamental to identifying landscapes and their diversity. Although the reasons of the outsider will not be excluded. A bivalent, cross-reading between the two different interpreters seems indispensable. In fact, both are lacking in something, for the reasons stated at the beginning, so that the first, as an actor living within a territory, will ignore the effects his work will have on the second, who as a semiologist, as a pure interpreter of signs, will operate ignoring the reasons of the first, for whom the landscape is an identity reference.

Only from the insider can come the indications for a reading of the lived landscape, just as the dictionary, classificatory, cartographic content can come from the outsider. Both, however, tend to go beyond classificatory systems that in themselves do not solve the problem of reading the landscape, which is not simply knowledge of the relationship between man and the natural environment (as normal geography understands it), but knowledge of how, through the landscape, man commensurate with the world. Hence the need to invoke self-reflexivity. Returning to the example of the perched centres, it is necessary to overcome the system of classificatory motivations, of cognitive, nuclear or molar typologies, in order to seek in the landscape the references on which the identity of the social group is built, the project, the idea that aims to realise it. Every society seeks to express in the landscape the sign of itself, the mark of its existence and its way of being, which in the case of the perched centres is realised through the choice of a place with a strong identity, distinguishable, recognisable within the context of anonymous, unrecognised, unnamed nature, and therefore with the characteristics that make it more easily accessible to culture, to denomination. This means that man does not produce landscape ‘despite himself’, as P. Castelnovi. Of course it can happen, and it has certainly happened for many societies pressed by particular economic contingencies, or threatened by war situations or natural disasters; but this is part of their history and culture, and we need to look at these in order to know why they have lacked the self-reflexive capacity, i.e. the ability to generate semiotic effects consistent with their own design, their own aspirations. In this sense, the search for the high ground as a place for settlement is the search for the place of strong identity in the indistinct sea of the foregone geography; for the man who lives there and has chosen it, it will not simply be the high ground that hosts his village, a generic, categorical term, a place like any other: but the unique high ground, the high ground as his own possession, as the centre of the world, as his own dwelling, as such defensible both against enemies and against erosion or flooding.

On the other hand, if we do not admit this search for the semiotic effect of man’s actions, then perhaps the very meaning of landscape and the content to investigate is lost; not only that, but it would otherwise not exist if not as the product of a brute, unconscious action, that is, one that all of us interested in landscape do not recognise as such. All our reflections, I believe, aim instead at understanding how man is able to best construct his living environment. If this does not happen, it is because there is a lack of self-reflexivity, awareness or interest in the effects that our actions have on nature, both in the aesthetic and ecological sense (generally the one corresponds to the other and vice versa, taking into account the positive effects that adherence to nature’s orders, respect for its rules, always has on the landscape). The societies that exclude from their objectives the effects in the landscape of their actions are the societies with little sense of nature, unbalanced, producing landscapes devoid of the sacred essence that the best societies have been able to express precisely through a reading of the landscape (natural or cultural) tuned to their own profound needs. In this sense, the semiological reading of the landscape consists of the reading of the meaning that the builders of the landscapes, i.e. the actors, the insiders, have recognised in it, as interpreters of the scenic text, as Carlo Socco says.

I made a reference to the complexity of the landscape when we want to recognise it in its contents that cannot be categorised in a merely dictionary sense, referring to the landscapes of others, i.e. looking at the landscape as an outsider. But if we consider what is happening in the world today, in the context of the processes of globalisation and atopization through the transmission of cultural styles and models outside the spheres that once gave precise identity and boundaries to the landscape units, to the regional frameworks into which terrestrial space was articulated in the eyes of geographers-semiologists, one has the impression that the dictionary contents, necessary for a taxonomic knowledge of the world at the stage of its discovery, are overwhelming the real, complex, often unspeakable, encyclopaedic contents, which refer back to the past and to the original semiosis, and which seem to us indispensable for understanding the reasons for the diversity of landscapes.

But communication today is petty, of colossal dimensions; therefore it needs to categorise to the maximum, to simplify and unify. I may be wrong, but the computer, the computerisation of our communication leads us to this. Then we lose the stories that lie at the origin of the world’s variety. This induces us to return to the local, it induces us to give content to our encyclopaedia that increasingly disregards the causal, deterministic and generic classifications of the old geography, leading us rather back to the history and sociology of the local, with its permanence, its memories, in which societies have their roots. In other words, it is now necessary to resort to a kind of socio-cultural determinism in order to make contributions to local landscapes: that is, to recognise, as mentioned above, the meanings of the meanings that men have given to their actions and used to relate to their living space.

In other words, we need to become historians and investigate in a psycho-sociological sense. It is in this direction that the semiology of the landscape can lead us, as a discipline aimed at reading the textual landscape, at grasping its meaning in depth (somewhat in the manner of NorbergSchultz when he speaks of Genius loci), as the only way to counter the tendencies towards homologation and atopy. This was basically the conclusion years ago of the contributions in that monographic issue of Espace Géographie dedicated to the semiology of landscape. Even today, it seems to me that this is the sense that should be given to this kind of research.

Bibliographic references

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