“When will Italy end? This is the seemingly paradoxical question that urban planners, environmentalists, and statisticians begin to ask themselves when reflecting on the accelerated pace with which, in the confusion of laws and the inability to plan, we are consuming that precious, limited, and irreproducible asset, which is the territory".

With this reflection in the distant November of 1983, Antonio Cederna, the founding father of Italia Nostra, writing on “La Repubblica” Italian newspaper, commented on the state of affairs of a nation that, frantically, was destroying the territory. His words today turn out to be prophetic, not only because of everything that has inevitably happened, including the actual awareness that the entire planet is in danger, but above all because, in essence, they contain a concept that should be explored and deserves a thoughtful reflection. For Antonio Cederna the precious asset is not an individual monument, archaeological site, work of art, or artistic expression that exists in a specific geographical area, since a material or immaterial good, isolated or considered on its own, cannot help but be the subject of a story (of a material and immaterial good) that intends to narrate the past, a story, a long period of life. It is necessary to contextualize the course of events, reconstructing all the expressions of an anthropized landscape, in which the community recognizes itself and from which it draws to develop the future.

And not by chance, Cederna uses the word “territory” and not “landscape”. It is the place, in fact, modified and treated by the presence of human beings, that generates through "time in hands," that material and immaterial culture recognized and protected by the individual community and decoded as the heritage of all humanity.

Thus, it is a landscape as a laboratory of aesthetic experiences, and anthropology dedicated multiple reflections to this concept, including the one according to which the "physiognomy of a place is determined by physical, anthropic, biological, and ethnic characteristics".

The European Landscape Convention states: "A landscape designates a certain part of territory, as perceived by people, whose character derives from the action of natural and/or human factors and their interrelationships". Thus, the Convention has introduced new methods of managing the landscape in its territorial dimension. Management, in terms of protection, aimed at the well-being of the community that lives in it, contributing to highlighting the cultural peculiarities of a specific environment in which, for centuries, man linked together historical, socio-economic, and cultural experiences, becoming an ethical-cultural component.

In this perspective, the landscape carries its own distinct identity, reflecting the aesthetic sensibility of those who inhabit it and constituting a social product in its dynamic evolution, altered by human presence.

And this holds true to the extent that today we perceive the presence of human beings even in the most isolated points, where nature may seem to be the absolute protagonist, if one does not discern the more or less discreet presence of humans.

The perception of the landscape is enhanced by an evident connection between nature and human intervention, consolidating the community's awareness of identity in the relationship between cultural expressions and the environment, which over time determine variations of the meaning and significance.

So, it is inconceivable to perceive a landscape isolated from human intervention, since even the highest unspoiled mountain peaks have the traces of human presence. Up there, on those peaks, the raised flags testify to the conquest of unexplored summits and a direct encounter with nature until then uncontaminated.

Also in the Arctic and Antarctica, lands that were isolated for a long time, today scientists from all over the world conduct advanced and revolutionary experiments for future actions and beneficial investigations for a man and the planet Earth.

The landscape cannot be not affected by human actions, a man writes its history, records its changes, accompanies it in its progress through continuous interactions, for which music captures its voices and transforms them into melodies; animals dictate the rules of ancient tribal dances; the fruits of a land, sometimes a cruel stepmother, other times more generous, influence the tastes and aromas of food and drinks; natural raw materials and natural stone quarries influence building techniques and sculptural products; natural pigments suggest painting interventions, from the first cave paintings to the most seductive pictorial representations; a touch given to a rough bark, smoothed river canes, thorny efflorescence recognizes their roughness, warmth, intimate vibrations.

Giuliana Andreotti has rightfully pointed out that: "the landscape is not only something to build or protect, but above all, something to recognize, perceive, listen to, and describe. The landscape is the hypostasis, that is the substance or true essence of the history of a territory".

In this perspective, it is impossible to deny that historical events, pandemics, natural disasters have influenced and continue to influence the landscape, upstream of human intervention on nature too often violent and ruinous.

Moreover, the same European Landscape Convention highlights the anthropic nature of the landscape, explicitly referring to the depletion caused by human intervention in nature through activities such as deforestation, extraction, construction of infrastructure, wars, and, not least, environmental degradation.

Therefore, the exhibition of works of art, dating back to the second half of the 19th - 20th century and reaching this millennium, aims to explore the complex relationships between art and nature, between nature and the individual capable of generating landscapes which, before being places, are "cultural and mental landscapes" that belong to the individual community and are witnesses and carriers of that reality.

In this perspective, the exhibition will cross in time and space a part of Italy and, while capturing its most ancient traditions, woven by a fraying of habits and customs that have been difficult to eradicate over time, it will observe variations of lights, colors, shadows that, between visions and cathartic and imaginative memories, make the substance of an ancestral landscape.

So, among the peaks of Gran Sasso, the Apennine peaks, the dawns and sunsets with the light magically crossing Gennaro Della Monica's chromatic palette, it will be difficult not to think that the real protagonist is the artist, perched between the narrow slots of the castle he built, to better capture the vibrations of nature between leafy and tense trees, like imploring hands towards the sky; streams rushing towards the river; sunny valleys where the human being is little more than a dot, geometric infinitesimal consistency in a world of a thousand forms.

And how can one not consider his works in the context of the nineteenth-century Neapolitan anti-academic movement of which he is a protagonist? How can one not identify in his small canvases, painted en plein air, the brushstrokes and light captured by the Barbizon school, imprinted on the canvas, as he became acquainted with through the account given by his friend Giuseppe Palizzi during the latter's stay in Paris? How not to perceive, in his so "textural" brushstrokes, the memory of the Tuscan "macchiaioli" and their broad colour fields with contrasts, tones and chiaroscuro, between a spot and a form?

What about the works of Carlo D'Aloisio, born in Vasto, a city caressed by the sea, in a reality marked by the glitter of overlapping waves, between boats rendered in a suspended atmosphere, painting in the memory of a youth spent there and abandoned at only sixteen, to pursue new experiences and new dreams? And so he “nel pensier (si) finge” (imagines in his thoughts) his beloved land and wraps it in sweet memories that fade reality and ignite ancient shadows. We are in the mid-20th century, among pictorial experiences of new generations, but memory once again frays and unravels reminiscences, wrapping objects and individuals to return to the gaze luminous and incandescent marine shores through a palette that often explodes on the wave of memories.

Peaks, plains, marine expanses, while the timeline rewinds to its spindle, and the present presses with its contradictions, its violence, its nonsense, its loss of memory.

And among their paintings, the sculptures of a woman, Licia Galizia, suddenly bloom, "vital" intervened by the musical composer Michelangelo Lupone, who interweaves his experience. It is today that stretches its arms to the future. To an imagined, dreamed, interpreted future, while lanceolate fragments hang from those inert bodies. And yet, this is landscape. Water, earth, spring. But it is the landscape of the third millennium. Of its contradictions, its incoherences, its antinomies; the disagreements of a global world shattered into individualities; the ancestral memories of mass migrations that over time have modified, together with the individual, the landscape of the entire cosmos. And meanwhile, the sounds, the melody of musical instruments, the touch, now violent, now gentle, of a hand, evoke, in inert matter, sensations and impetuous, overwhelming, violent or calm, sweet and reassuring emotions.

So, in the very narrow passage where the composition “Mare oscuro” dominates, deliberately "caged" in an almost residual space, the very real possibility that the edges may touch or brush, will force the viewer to witness the agitation of those waves, pulsating, leaping, oscillating, trembling, as if shaken by a memory too recent to be forgotten. It is the Mediterranean Sea, a place of life over the centuries, transformed into a space of death. A symbol of connection, relations, exchanges between peoples since ancient times; cradle of ancient civilizations and thaumaturgical creativity reduced to the custodian of despair and death.

But in the twisted volutes of that stormy sea, the sound of life rises slow and inexorable! The echo of its past resounds, the voices of those who sailed that expanse in peace and harmony.

Meanwhile, three works, placed at a considerable distance in three points of our old Europe, to the sound of a viola, will move almost in unison, in a concordant harmony that serves to admonish those who believe that discord can be a source of progress and life. Here in Strasbourg, Paris, and Teramo, the hands of the visually impaired will “observe” these works, and through their touch, they will experience emotions more poignant and vital than those who have forgotten to utilize, along with their other senses, the sense of touch, relying solely on sight.

Therefore, the exhibition, rather than merely a tribute to art, aspires to be an offering of reconciliation between tradition and post-modernism; between nature and the individual; between landscapes and communities; between rationality and creativity. It is only through the harmony of these opposites that water, air, earth, and fire-the primary Pythagorean or Empedoclean elements-of a nature often disrupted, will once again dictate the rules of a peaceful and harmonious coexistence.