Classificare i paesaggi culturali tradizionali: criteri metodologici e applicazione

The Italian peninsula is characterized by a high presence of Traditional Landscapes. “Traditional” refers to those landscapes that have a long history, a slow change, in agreement with the environmental factors. However, this high landscape richness is not supported by widespread inventory tools. A multidisciplinary approach is necessary in landscape analysis. Differences come out comparing the few existing inventories at national and sub-national levels in Italy based on holistic criteria, due to the number and type of thematic layers used in the analysis. Moreover, more sectorial approaches exist in the agronomic anf forestry field, often analysing and detecting landscape agro-forestry units on the basis of land use maps only. Nowadays, there is a lack of a sistematic and complete classification of these landscape types in Italy, the first necessary step for a further functional evaluation and a conservation policy and practice. Similar consideration are pointed out at sub-national level (administrative regions); for axample, in Sicily landscape inventory are absent both for the whole island or for specific areas. The aim of this work is to give a framework on the inventory of landscapes carried out at nation wide in Italy at differente scale and to highlight differences on the criteria used. Thus, the necessity of a multidisciplinary approach for the classification of Traditional landscapes is stressed, going through general to detailed level. An applicative example was carried out for the identification of Traditional Agroforestry Landscapes of Mt. Etna (E Sicily).