Landscape Planning Policy as a Measure of Implementation of the European Landscape Convention

The paper asks whether and to what extent the Italian planning system conforms to the European Landscape Convention’s objectives and rationale. To do it, the complex nature of the European Landscape Convention implementation, due to its ambiguous legal nature and structure, is first discussed. Then, the discussion moves to how the manifold meanings of the landscape within the Convention react to planning practices. Given the duplicity of the core purpose of landscape in the Convention, either as subjective perception or as objective scenery, the answer to the question above is affirmative as long as we recognise the tension running through the text of the Convention between these two notions.