Geopolitica del paesaggio. Nel laboratorio dello Stato Pontificio

Lorenzetti’s picture on Good Government, which Angelo Turco considers a model of the “fusion” of Territoriality and Politics, arrival point of an old tradition, is emblematic of the role of the representation of landscape as a symbol of sovereignity in modern age. In this context, the Pontifical State has been a laboratory of modern sovereignity. Marche region, in the Pontifical State, is studied here from a long period point of view (Thirteenth – Seventeenth centuries) considering its perception as a fertile “garden” because chosen as a destination of Jesus’ holy home from Nazareth to Loreto. The Dukedom of Urbino was similarly considered as a garden for legitimating soflty its geopolitical identity, celebrating its landscape and the “magnificenze” of its towns, instead of organizing a structured nation, such as elsewhere, showing the weackness of its feudal power, linked to Papal favour, subject to eventual revocation. Its new capetown, Pesaro, substituting Urbino in the Fifeteenth century, was called “garden town” and the Della Rovere Dukes themselves, cultivating architecture, projected its gardens and the network of villas where the court took place, protecting Italian and Flemish landscape painters. The villa and the garden are, in Seventeenth century, the new icons of European Sovereignity, and this model will be soon diffused in Europe. This employment of landscape/territory as a tool of communication and of instruction of consciences had a secular tradition in Marche region, from the control of anarchic heremitism, in medieval age, till the legitimation of urban life promoted by the mendicant orders in Fourteenh-Fifeteenth centuries. Marche region, to-day celebrated for its beautiful landscape, has been a laboratory for experimenting the geopolitical use of the aesthetized territory and its narrations; it showes the multiscalar connections of the deep link among the processes of constitution, configuration and ontology of the territory.