Teaching Landscape as Heritage: University Training between Specialization and Transversality

Abstract

Operating on landscape as heritage requires appropriate knowledge and skills. Today, in Italy, university training on landscape is rather limited, offering only four master's degree courses. These address the issue now as new design, now as territorial planning, now as conservation of historic parks and gardens. Sometimes there is a lack of an overall vision and, above all, of a conservation approach, which allows us to look at the landscape as defined by the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape or as a complex cultural asset, palimpsest, written and rewritten text of human history. The paper attempts to construct a first framework of university training on landscape, through a census of study plans and teaching programs; it specifies the contents that it is currently essential to develop in relation to the landscape, within the discipline of restoration; it offers reflections on the need for interdisciplinarity, but also on the key role of the conservative approach to a knowledge and design of places aware of the patrimonial values they express.