La storia assente: i limiti della Convenzione Europea del Paesaggio

The European Landscape Convention is an international treaty of great importance in the European institutional framework, but it contains a number of unclear and controversial points. This article investigates the relationship between the Convention and history, disclosing several critical aspects. In particular, it is worth mentioning that from the text of the Convention the term history/histoire is missing. The essay explores the reasons for this absence, in relation to a more general crisis of historical culture that affects the European nations. This crisis had already been foreseen by a number of authors, such as Jean-François Lyotard, Eric Hobsbawm, Claude Lévi-Strauss and François Hartog. In Italy, the most recent book by Adriano Prosperi (Un tempo senza storia, 2021) investigates the crisis of historical culture in contemporary societies, severely affecting schools and students’ educational programmes. The European Convention apparently shares this approach that constitutes a real threat to a proper knowledge of landscapes as repositories of collective memory and cultural heritage.