A Registered Landscape

The landscape of Tuscany is known for its gentle hills, lovely forestry and natural beauty. But only a few know that this beautiful rural scenery is actually a really well done design work. A good example is Val d'Orcia, a region around Siena, where the landscape was redesigned during the Renaissance.

Lorenzetti painted the ideal landscape around 1338 in the town hall of Siena, and in order to respond to this utopian model Val d'Orcia became reality. This area is on the UNESCO world heritage list since 2004.

Italian artist Giuseppe Licarli made an intervention in the shape of a trademark in the landscape to make us all wonder to whom this natural scenery really belongs.

As he explains: "Who has the ownership of its beauty and harmony? Everything was designed, reshaped, destroyed and finally protected resulting in the valley as we see it now. After millions of years of evolution the natural and anthropologic process of this landscape has stopped, constraining it to resist any human or natural variation and remaining still for the future generations, as a registered product."

And so we can ask ourselves the question: which landscape is not designed?