The sense of caring for places develops in communities that feel themselves the historical and cultural owners of the territorial and therefore landscape heritage they inhabit. The laborious practices of mountain management testify to the complexity of the communities’ relationship with places: not only for the sense of identity, but also to provide space for exploration and above all for the sense of the sacred, so important in the past and still alive today but increasingly secret.
The usi civici, like the Magnifica comunità, are the result of the work of entire communities for entire generations, a sign of a culture that has believed in the importance of collective, lasting enterprises.
Two notes on the term ‘usi civici’ (civic uses), which will later serve us well: we speak of USI and not of goods, i.e. there is an implicit recognition of work: the common good is not the land, but the land that produces because we have tended it and used it well: because there is work that has made it useful.

Why do we then say CIVIC, when instead they are typically rural, the fruit of peasant labour? The root of civic is not part of the recent separation of town and country, it derives from civitas, civilisation: that pact that unites individuals not in blood ties but in agreements of common culture. The rural world endowed itself with civitas with common uses, making pacts and defining rules of the same type as those that were the basis for the formation of medieval cities, founded on the term COMMON, which we still use today, without realising it, to identify the only territorial institution that no one questions.
The medieval city is founded on a pact of civic uses, which form the commune.
Of these uses there remain, like floating relics along a completely new stream, the civic uses of rural communities, especially in the mountains, where the need to be together in the face of the adventure of agricultural production was strongest: these are the pastures at high altitudes, the woods, the waters derived from glaciers, those that in the valley are always managed commonly, but become the property of consortia, of autonomous bodies, detached from the communities.
However, it is always worth noting that no one is concerned with the objects, which are taken for granted as common property, but with their management: the uses, which must be civic, that is, not only intended for but controlled by the community… it would be good to keep this as a compass for specious debates such as the one on water, in which use is distinguished from property….

So the civic uses are the magnificent sign of the care of the mountains that is implicit in rural practices, those that have in their DNA the sustainability of the use of the resource, that take care of the balance between natural processes and their derivatives useful to the community (present and future) and in this care slow down or accelerate cycles, exploit microclimates, maintain conditions without ever distorting the processes, not because the farmer is good or ecologist, but because of a healthy principle of economy dictated by hard work, which is maximum in the mountains: when you have accomplished the feat of terracing and making a field on a slope bear fruit you try to make it yield for many years, when you have built a shelter for livestock grazing at altitude you do it in such a way that it is protected from avalanches and that you will find it again next summer, etc. Hard work is an excellent advisor for doing and maintaining, and induces a respect for the fruit of one’s own labour and that of those who have gone before us and a criterion of real economy, that is, of the laws that govern life.

What does landscape have to do with it?
Let us make the definition of the European convention our own:

When we speak of landscape we do not speak of things, of places, but of the social relationship there is with places.
Up to this point, landscape does not emerge, it is beneath the surface: no traditional mountain dweller acts or tells about himself on the basis of his own perception of the territory, but directly acts on or tells about the territory. And the territory is one’s own, which need not be said because everyone knows it.
In the Tao it is said ‘blessed is the peasant who looks out from his own slope at the inhabitants of the other village on the opposite slope, greets them and is greeted in return, and has never been on the other side of the slope’: in the traditional world it is thought that the whole world is a country, and therefore there is no need to represent the landscape.

The definition of CEP entails the emergence of a theme of awareness, which is inherent in what is not there naturally, but like household cleaning, one notices when it is missing.
A society that has closed itself off in cities, that no longer produces in direct contact with the land, misses the landscape, and discovers its cultural version: the perceptive relationship with the land.
So much so that when we say landscape we think of a non-urban place, with lots of greenery, partly cultivated and partly not, with sparse settlement signs…. un pays, (we are Latin and Mediterranean and always think of man-made landscapes):
In the north they think of the landschaft, the face of the earth, natural, without man.

When we move from the community united by hard work to a larger social entity, inhabiting a complex and partial territory, in which not all the needs of living are included in the place where one is, then the need for landscape emerges.
Here we move from economics to culture, from the primary need: to feed oneself, to have a roof, to complex needs: to feel at home, to enjoy the pleasure of dwelling in the fullest sense of the term (to have habit with places, incoative of the verb to have: to continue to have).

We have tried to distinguish three great sides on which the paths of meaning activated by the landscape decline, through an interpretative model based on an antinomy: identity and otherness.
According to this criterion, our attention to landscape normally goes in search of signs, and the CEP tells us that landscape is an important component of the sense of identity of European peoples.
In this phase of territorial mobility and cultural melting pot we need to reassure ourselves, to re-establish our identity card, and landscape is important. This is why we must resist the pressures of homologation, of producing non-places, of being indifferent to differences.

But there is not only the sense of identity, but also that of otherness: the feeling of being intrigued because we are different, of being moved by a sense of conquest, of expansion because we are in front of signs and senses that we did not know until a moment before and now that we have perceived them we feel we have enriched our heritage (of experience if nothing else, and sometimes of culture). On the one hand ‘the confirmation of identity through known signs, (on the other) the search for new trophies of signs in hitherto unexplored territories of otherness……
The sense of exploration is particularly true in the mountains:
‘The true mountaineer is the man who attempts new ascents. It does not matter whether he succeeds or not; he derives his pleasure from the imagination and the game of struggle’ Mummery, 1890, who used the term “fair means”: loyal means, i.e. assigned only to one’s own body.

But sometimes these two opposing tensions are not enough to explain the multipolarities of meaning that agitate us when we look at a landscape: there is also their contradiction, the mad desire to dwell in the sacred, to experience a relationship with the environment without the mediation of domesticating apparatuses such as the sense of beauty, of order, and above all without the sense of meaning, trying to overcome the obsessive tension to semicity that reassures us and that is probably the radical intimate of dwelling: naming things, giving oneself a reason for them. The panic sense, the romantic losing oneself, the belonging rather than possessing are products of a third drive, removed and repudiated by all gnoseology and almost all aesthetics, but which has certainly always agitated our culture and which persists, in the outcomes of the artistic movements of the last three hundred years, on widespread taste’.
In the definition of the Treccani dictionary: ‘In the strict sense, that which is connected to the experience of a completely different reality, in comparison with which man feels radically inferior, undergoing its action and being both terrified and fascinated by it. In opposition to the profane, what is sacred is separate, it is other, just as both those who are assigned to establish a relationship with it and the places, destined for acts with which that relationship is established, are separate from the community. The sacred is that which men perceive as totally other and which manifests itself with mysterious force, in relation to which they feel subjected, frightened and at the same time attracted’.
But the structural particularity of the sense of the sacred perhaps lies precisely in the different attitudes of the subjects: therefore we must be willing, attentive, disposed to make sense of the landscape we perceive.

But, outside of philosophical generality, the landscape comes in the form of places, different in themselves and differently perceived: we should have some competence in selecting the most suitable places for each type of experience. Here opens one of the pages most frequently visited by critics of modernity: we have lost all ability to perceive the differences of places. Just as entire disciplines studied where it was best to live, so every archaic culture identified sacred places, many of which have housed temples of the most diverse religions over the centuries, increasingly confirming the sacredness of the site. We do not: for the past couple of centuries, official culture has become scientified and has lost the sense of these ancient knowledges, much to the chagrin of scholars like Guenon, who lamented the loss of traditional knowledge, which gave space to exceptional places because of the power of the sacred they contain.
From the archaic (far away from us in time, antediluvian, or still present in time but far away in culture, anti-Western) surely still comes the intuition to seek out places suitable for a sublime experience, as Kant defined it, or at least one that facilitates the listening to a new sense of things: Elemire Zolla speaks of the Mountain (how can we forget Renee Daumal’s extraordinary Monte Analogo?), Simon Shama extends the field of investigation to the sacred stories of the Forest.
In a beautiful page, Sergio Quinzio compares the two archetypal places of the sacred, the forest and the desert: ‘For pagan, cosmic religions, the forest is the most evident manifestation of the pulsing of the divine forces that animate nature, and therefore the most intense sacred symbol… Opposite the sacredness of the forest, gloomy and full of the mysterious voices that the wind draws from the treetops, there is for the ancient monotheist the desert. Just see what the desert is for the Jew Edmond Jabes. The mystery does not lie in things, which are indeed offered to mankind, but beyond things, in the transcendence of the one God, of whom the boundless expanse of the desert is a symbol’ (in Boschi e foreste, ed.Gruppo Abele 1994, p.57). Luisa Bonesio takes the discourse further by exploring the differences of the three archetypal paths to a new meaning through places: the experience of the sacred in the desert, in the forest and on the mountain (in La terra invisibile, Marcos y Marcos,1993).
a) In the first instance we are induced by the urban culture that has besieged us for at least 200 years, to confuse the search for the natural with the search for the supernatural. We cultivate an abstract idea of the natural, with which we now have direct relations that are as rare as with the supernatural: our continuous attention to the signs of the landscape is confirmed in landscapes that are always full of signs, in landscapes that are culturised in manufactured objects and not only in our gaze. Nature thus becomes, in our desire to encounter otherness, a phantom that is superimposed on the anxiety of the sacred, and the imagery that accompanies our personal, artisanal and unrealistic sense of the sublime are increasingly linked to natural spaces that would probably have seemed normal (insofar as inhabitable) to the archaic wise, to experiences of contact with a nature that we transfigure while for them it is home (remember Dersu Uzala, the forest guide protagonist of Kurosawa’s masterpiece). But we have lost both familiarity and respect, that which makes the Seattle chief of the Apaches sing that everything is sacred, because the entire experience of life is in intense relationship with a nature that has its own autonomous system of signs and values, respected as different; our relationship with nature is mythical: Zolla says that we seek an astonishment but we no longer have the gaze capable of naivety;
b) in the second instance, we are induced by a millenary search for community to pay attention to its own cultural heritage, to the signs of itself that the koinè traces in places to hold its components together. We share anxieties about identity and seek confirmation from places, from the landscape: we seek homelands for our people. The sense of koinè by definition cannot immerse itself in a foreign environment and remain steeped in it: it maintains an impermeability, it makes a shell of the environment known through its internal relations and cannot access otherness. We all know that if you go in a group abroad, you cannot learn foreign languages, let alone the experience of the sacred. Ulysses teaches us: he had to detach himself from his own to listen to the Sirens, even though his companions prevented him from turning the sublime experience into the ultimate journey;

c) in the third instance, and in coherence with the choice to privilege community relations, a process of symbolisation of the sacred, of shifting from direct and ostensive experience, involving the senses and sense, to an abstract, representative, ritual communication, has been triggered for over a millennium. And in the West, this symbolic representation is based on building acts, signs in the landscape (this is not the case everywhere: think of the rituals of the Australian Aboriginal communities recounted by Chatwin in The Routes of Songs). In our history, on the other hand, we have the same sequence everywhere: first there was the sacred place, made sacred by the presence (or the manifestation) of the God, devoid of human signs; then the community marked the sacred place with its own building, the temple, then the sign of the temple, which remained as testimony to the ancient devotion to the sacred, detached itself from the place where the God is and was built where the devotees are.
Each culture’s quest to strike a balance between the three components:
the evolution of identity: the country (the church, the ecclesia, the community, the steeple) is lost in the city, except for the historic centre
the evolution of exploration the cities’ loss of identity drives tourism, the new form of exploration, but it too is lost, in mass tourism
the evolution of the sacred (from the symbol we return to the immanence of nature): monotheistic religions, it has been said, are born from the desert; polytheistic ones, from the forest; it is easy to understand why: solitude, the unequal relationship must be reproduced
The mountain as a frontier landscape, where the three components find very advanced balances, due to the strong presence of nature
nature as a reference for the sacred
tourism as exploration towards nature
cultivation as identity in relation to nature
here is the role of mountain agriculture: to teach a different kind of tourism, both to explore and to savour again the sense of the sacred
Tourism, like all isms, carries with it a negative connotation: to the rural world of past centuries, ‘going out and about’ appeared as an extravagance, reserved for the eccentric wealthy, a mania of those who renounced the comforts of residence to seek out who knows what different (and therefore perverse) pleasures. Because, beyond the contempt summed up in the peasant admonition ‘sta a ca’ tua’, it is clear to all that these are pleasures: tourism involves going to unfamiliar places by choice, out of curiosity, for the sake of personal cultural and psychophysical enrichment.
In short, tourism is a bourgeois version of romantic travel, the comfortable reproduction of adventurous exploration and the adolescent pleasures that that emotion entails.
Much more politically correct is the recent history of the term ‘landscape’, which was dedicated in the European Convention to accompany ‘peoples’ sense of identity’. In the common sense, still influenced by the settled peasant civilisation, ‘populations’ are the inhabiting societies: the sense of identity is supposed to grow like a plant, tied to the soil, therefore the heritage of those who have a stable, rooted relationship with ‘their’ landscape. The tourist, on a preconceived reading, seems alien to the Convention’s definition: an intruder, someone who peeks at or, worse, potentially tramples on someone else’s landscape.
But, as happens with cholesterol, the negative version, which immediately sees the damaging aspects caused by clogging and accumulation, does not explain the whole phenomenon: if one delves deeper, one discovers that a certain amount of tourism is not only useful, but constitutes a fundamental resource for the enhancement (and therefore the maintenance) of the landscapes we love.

Before outlining the requirements of the auspicious alliance between inhabitants who know how to host and tourists who know how to be guests, the profile of the TB (‘Good Tourist’) must be drawn. And for this we need to go back to the initial definition: tourism is a pleasure, involving going to unfamiliar places by choice, out of curiosity, for the sake of personal cultural and psychophysical enrichment.
The tourist who seeks this type of pleasure
– is curious and is careful to perceive as much as possible the novelty and difference of the landscapes he encounters, compared to those he already knows;
– relates his or her usual needs to the situations he or she encounters, also in terms of comfort, diet, social behaviour;
– he recognises the added value of the culture of the landscape of those he inhabits, and with that culture, made up of skills and visions different from his own, he enters into a relationship, he listens to them (in the witty meaning of the term given by Barthes in the Encyclopaedia Einaudi, 1977), enjoying in that relationship a good slice of the pleasure of the tour.
These TB requisites induce behavioural practices that go beyond those dictated by good manners or the ethics of egalitarianism. TB motivations are the very basis of travel, of exploring the other from oneself, of the postulate that one’s identity is enriched through understanding other identities.
Without that curiosity and appreciation of the diversity of the landscape, the focus on oneself prevails, obscures listening, and the taste for specificity is lost: the pleasure of the trip fades and ends up no longer being worthwhile.
Obviously, if these priorities of attention and listening are set, then conditions of time and space are unavoidable: the TB must be free to move around and stop, to look around, to chat, to deviate from planned routes, to await opportunities to overcome the natural diffidence reserved for outsiders. In a classic metaphor: one must create the conditions for serendipity, that situation that Perec and others explored with such dedication (Perec,1989) (Bagnasco, 1994) (Merton & Barber,2008). This fundamental condition definitively separates the good tourist from the bad, mass, time-counted and self-referential tourist.
An extraordinary testimony of the virtuous process, of integration between awareness of one’s own and attention to the landscape of others, is given by the collection of ‘Luoghi del cuore’ (places of the heart) put together since 2003 by the FAI in collaboration with Intesa Sanpaolo. In the various editions between 2003 and 2008, even independently of the intentions of the promoters, there has been a metamorphosis of the prevailing messages (more than 100,000 each year).
In the first phase, most of the places of birth were reported, often neglected or unknown, but considered interesting by the inhabitants, who were naturally fond of them. These were joined, and then prevailed, by reports of ‘choice’ landscapes, by tourists who wanted to witness the emotion of places discovered and enjoyed in all their specificity. It is precisely the landscapes of choice that are placed, in a third phase, at the centre of the metamorphosis of the tourist (and sometimes of the inhabitant) into a ‘militant’: the reports gradually become more and more concerned about the preservation of beloved sites, they denounce dangerous projects, they make appeals against degradation.
In short, a ‘political’ process occurs, statistically and on a sample basis, in which several salient phases emerge: from awareness of a landscape resource not chosen (on the part of the local inhabitant) to a search for recognition of resources sought and chosen (on the part of the TB), to the ‘taking charge’ of a landscape of affection, an attitude that is now dominant in reports to FAI in recent years, whether by tourists or inhabitants, or, as is increasingly the case, by members of the two solidarity groups.
From phase to phase there is an increasing assumption of responsibility, which is manifested at first in the publicising of one’s own position: the first and second steps are a sort of ‘landscape outing’, in which the inhabitant and the tourist declare themselves committed precisely in the act of recognising a landscape; the third phase is a leap forward, for citizens who we might think of as normally uninvolved in a strong role of civic commitment, who mobilise themselves for a cause not linked to personal or category interests or advantages, but to defend and enhance a common good. They want to trigger processes of publicisation, of calling everyone to assess, to participate in and take charge of a common good, defending it not as specific users but as representatives of the world (present and future).

In virtuous cases, such as those promoted by Petrini, long-term programmes emerge from the economic relationship between TB and inhabitant, in which we no longer discuss the sustainability of tourism, but the participation of TB in the sustainability of landscape projects. In those cases, the conscious consumer enters directly as an operator in the economic-territorial processes, in aid and not in aggression of landscape diversity, as happens with the GAS (Gruppi di Acquisto Solidali – Solidarity Purchasing Groups) in many provinces of central Italy in favour of qualified agricultural production or, with projects that have just been set up, for dairy production in some Alpine pastures.
These are second-generation cases, in which tourism and consumption are constituted as actors and not mere users of the landscape, putting to good use the results of the first lesson: tourism is a pleasure, an art of hospitality, with the precepts of the second: which entails mutual responsibilities and joint undertakings between guests.
On the other hand, the permanent inhabitant enjoys the landscape on a daily basis with competence and within the framework of deep-rooted knowledge, but inattentively. One does not normally reflect on the aspects of pleasure and resource for the quality of life that come to us from the landscape we inhabit. The ordinary relationship with the landscape is implicit, neglected like an involuntary muscle, of which we only become fully aware when it is defective, when it is missing (Raffestin 2005).
If the motor of attention to landscape is driven by the desire for something one no longer has (or is in danger of no longer having), it does not start with the inhabitant except when one fears its loss. Thus, under normal conditions, the inhabitant does not consciously rely on the landscape for his or her quality of life: he or she must be aroused, must encounter someone who instead seeks the landscape, someone who is pleased to hear ‘his or her’ relationship with ‘his or her’ places: his or her sense of landscape.
Therefore, the inhabitant almost always succeeds in activating the fundamental practice of landscape awareness only by taking the TB as a target: one becomes aware of the heritage one has precisely at the act of offering it to the enjoyment of the outsider.