Tra Montello e città diffusa. La percezione del paesaggio e delle sue trasformazioni

The perception that the population has of the landscape is a factor which influences their behaviour and conditions their decision making, especially when choices need to be made between transformation and preservation. Popular opinion, the mechanisms by which it is formed and through which it is expressed therefore has a great deal of importance for landscape studies because it isn’t simply reality that influences behaviour, as much as the idea that we have of it (Zerbi, 1993). The European Landscape Convention (Florence, 2000) underlined the role that the population must take in the management of landscapes. In this brief analysis we intend to examine how the population perceives the landscape of the Montello in comparison with the area of the Veneto plain which surrounds it. We have endeavoured to examine how this relationship between the hillside and the plain tends to be organized today at a time when the Montello is becoming seen as an island of green and nature in the increasingly built up areas which surround it. In order to analyse the views held of the Montello landscape by those who live on it or close to it, we carried out interviews with people from both groups. Initially the conversations tended to give rise to expressions of opinion about the uniqueness of the Montello and a general recognition of that fact. However, one of the most unique features, the karst (or sinkholes), is only rarely recognised despite the fact that a “morphology with depressions” is often described and acknowledged as a characteristic. It is interesting to note that those who live on the Montello don’t mention the sinkholes as a defining feature of the landscape as they think of them as being “normal”. One unique feature of the Montello which is recognised by almost all of those interviewed is the amount of “green” among the woods and meadows; it is an environment that is considered natural or semi-natural – and this is in itself considered to be valuable – despite the fact that there is no particular commonly held knowledge of the characteristics of the place itself, e.g. of it’s vegetation. The Montello was also described as a “comfortable” hill. The absence of steep hills and the proximity to the services available on the plain render it an area of natural beauty which is both easy to enjoy and not too remote for those that live on it. Based on this perhaps superficial view, almost all those interviewed demonstrated an intense affection for the Montello. Lastly it should be underlined that in asking people about the characteristics of the landscape “of” the Montello, the answers tended to regard the landscape as “seen from” the Montello: the two realities of the hill and the plain which surrounds it need therefore to be considered as a single entity: it is a relationship from which emerge both diversities and communalities, in particular when speaking of the transformations to the local landscape. The analyses of the changes to the landscape of the Montello conducted, based on cartography and aerial photography, were compared to the opinions that people had about recent territorial transformations. Despite not being particularly intense, these modifications are generally perceived by the inhabitants of the Montello area either as not presenting any particular problem or indeed they are not perceived at all. The flat land which surrounds the Montello – in the same way as much of the Veneto plain – has in contrast been affected by massive change over the last decade, changes which take the form of a gradual saturation and progressive joining together of built-up areas. This “urban sprawl” is the result of the construction of both residential and industrial buildings as well as roads and other types o