Tuscany

Abstract

Few regions have been celebrated for the beauty of their landscape as much as Tuscany. Today this region is regarded as a prime example of a cultural identity that owes its significance, in part, to the high standard of living that goes with it. Significant elements of the region’s historical identity still live on in the present landscape. These, however, coexist with other aspects that reflect the construction of a public image promoted by a number of different subjects. Historical identity and public perception do not necessarily coincide in their image of a landscape that is certainly one of the most significant expressions of the region’s identity, but that cannot be allowed to be influenced by phenomena that have not previously stood the test of history. The selected areas, although they hardly do justice to the variety of the region’s landscape, are nevertheless representative of long-standing realities, and can thus be regarded as epitomizing at least part of the Tuscan territory, considering that they all lie in the north-central part of the region. The region’s territory is mainly hilly (66.5 %) and mountainous (25.1 %), with few plains (8.4 %) and an extensive coast (397 km), and encompasses a variety of environments modeled by agriculture. The first farmers to put their stamp on the landscape were the Etruscans. The technique of training of grapevine on trees (used to dominate the Tuscan, Umbrian and Marche landscape until at least as late as the 1960s. We are thus looking at about 3,000 years of history, and this alone would be reason enough for safeguarding this form of cultivation, regardless of technical or economic considerations, often invoked to justify its disappearance. We have not been able to find a sufficiently extensive treed vineyard area. This type of cultivation only survives in the form of small relics dotting the countryside, maintained by elderly farmers who sense that their importance goes well beyond their economic utility. As in the rest of Italy, the expansion of farmland under Roman rule was followed by centuries of abandonment with a trend to a prevalence of woodland and pastures. This gave rise to landscape features, especially in the Lombard age, that endured well into the nineteenth century (see the text on Moscheta), surviving even the spread of sharecropping, which had less landscape impact in the south of Tuscany than in the north. In the centuries following the year 1000, extensive marshes formed in the plains and along the coast as a consequence of the abandonment of agriculture.