"Conoscenza, valutazione, monitoraggio del paesaggio/Knowledge, evaluation, monitoring landscape"

The landscape notion is rather escaping (Phillips, Borrini-Feyerabend, 2); in fact on one side it cannot be quantified, measured, from the other cannot be translate in the same way in the various languages. The landscape has a central role in the international (European Convention of the Landscape, CEP, 2000) and Italian attention (Code of the cultural heritage and the landscape, 2004, 2006, 2008), but it is hardly the “scene” of the action. The landscape is observable, but difficultly reachable by policies and plans in order to manage and “to create it”; it is also far from the populations, main landscape actors as the stage of theirs daily lifes (Turri, 2007). Often the norms, the objectives of quality of the regional landscape planning find difficulty to be translated in practices at the local and provincial scale, contributing to the construction of a new “territorial and landscape scene”. The populations are too much often not included in the processes of transformation of their landscapes. In coherence with the European Landscape Convention we should develop methodologies and tools in order to give the “scene” to the landscape. Landscape indicators constitute an interesting tool in order to read the evolution of the landscape, to make it visible and accessible to the institutional actors and the populations. The indicators allow in fact to translate ecological, cultural, symbolic, social, economic meaning of the landscape in an interpretable experience from the society and the policies. The paper introduces a recent research experience of “DITER, Foundation CRT, Piemonte Region, 2009, Landscape indicators. Indicators for the monitoring and the management of the landscape” that, beginning from the international studies, tries to define a method for the interpretation of the landscape and to construct a set of indicators applicable to regional scale and local scale.