Valuing place/placing value: the elusive normativity of landscape in rural Tuscany

Abstract

Rural Tuscany has become both a paragon of harmonious beauty and a terrain of legal conflict and recrimination. When they do not resort to essentialist notions of taste, many commentators are prone to explain the ‘preservation’ of Tuscany's countryside as the outcome of locally rooted legislative interventions meant to prevent ‘speculation’ and ‘debasement’ (scempio). Tuscany is indeed the site of layers of normative constraints and guidelines, ranging from local zoning regulations to the expectations associated with UNESCO's World Heritage Site status. Far from being self-evident, however, these normative constructs have been debated in Tuscan society over decades of rapid and often chaotic change. The reinvention of rural Tuscany as a paragon of beauty emerged from the search for an elusive form of coherence and meaning, whose features generated both conflict and accommodations. By focusing on a valley in southern Tuscany which obtained the status of World Heritage Site in 2004 (the Orcia valley), the article shows the power of the circumventions, negotiations and reinterpretations in which rural Tuscans have engaged while navigating the alternative temporalities of global validation, national legitimation and local belongings.

Keywords::

• Landscape
• heritage
• Tuscany
• agriculture
• tourism
• territorial planning
• zoning laws

Notes

¹ Archivio Storico del Movimento Operaio Senese, Fondo PDS, Box V Dc – Urbanistica, Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica, Sezione Toscana, Gruppo Provinciale Area Senese.

² Archivio Storico del Movimento Operaio Senese, Fondo PDS, Box V Dc – Urbanistica, ‘Parco Artistico Naturale e Culturale della Val d'Orcia: dai Progetti alla Gestione’ proceedings of the international conference held at Montalcino in December 1994.

³ Proposition d'Inscription dans la Liste des Biens Culturels et Naturels du Patrimoine Mondial, Nomination 2003, La Val d'Orcia, Document number 4, Quadro Conoscitivo e Allegati, September 2002 (material obtained from Luca Rossi in S. Quirico).

⁴ Agenda XXI della Val d'Orcia, Piano di Gestione dell'ANPIL, Programma Pluriennale 2003–2006, drafted by the mayors in 2002 (material obtained from Luca Rossi in S. Quirico).