Identity through landscape, identity of landscape

Assuming as a guideline Paolo D’Angelo’s theory of landscape as “aesthetic identity of places”, the paper discusses two ways of considering the relationship between identity and landscape: 1) identity as collective identity of a community, of a social group, or of a nation (identity in or through landscape); 2) identity in an ontological sense (identity of landscape). The first meaning insists on the identifying function of landscape for the people who live in it. It’s a meaning subject to demagogic dangers, which do not stem from the ambiguity inherent in this particular meaning of identity, but rather depend on the difficulty of recognizing it in the forms of landscape. The second meaning deals with the search for the constitutive elements that allow to identify a landscape as that specific landscape and without which that landscape is not that any longer. Such elements are to be considered both in the sense of material ones and in the sense of experiential ones. The paper ends touching on the issues of the transformations of landscape and of the role played by the professionals who deal with landscape design and planning, in order to make every intervention respectful of the identity of the places. The examples given are taken from the context of Sardinia, witness of exemplar transformative interventions in the recent past, but today facing up to alarming alterations of its own landscape patrimony.