Landscape architecture education in Italy: fragmented patterns

Taking the close relationship between the education and the profession of landscape architecture as its starting point, the essay traces an overview of the evolution of landscape architecture education in Italy. The narrative follows three key moments: it starts with the 1920s, when a fragmented pattern of isolated courses were offered within university curricula in architecture; it analyses the debate on the necessity of specific academic training programmes in landscape architecture that emerged following WWII and examines the role of a number of educators, scholars, and practitioners, to underline their influence on educational approaches; it examines the first attempts to give a unified form to the fragmented pattern of landscape studies that were made from the early 1980s that led to the establishment of the first graduate programmes in landscape architecture.