Landscapes are always the result of society-nature interaction, where spatial and environmental configurations are produced for certain purposes and through specific narratives and ideologies which shape them. Human communities and ecosystems are entangled in co-evolutionary processes which tend to legitimize the resulting assemblages. We embrace theoretically the concept of “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011), i.e. “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, (…) that is dispersed in time and space, and is generally not seen as violence at all”. We concentrate on a twofold investigation: first, on landscapes resulting from the debilitating physical work of agricultural workers; secondly, on negatively impacted communities with the by-products of agricultural monocultures such as chemical fertilizers in monocultures. In different aspects we question the heritagization process in three UNESCO sites, where vine-growing has slowly created variegated territorial effects: the research will concentrate on wine as an element of economic exploitation and related repercussions, such as touristification, environmental damage and human profiteering, drawing attention on the fact that the final outcome is often the opposite of what the Convention aims to promote. The paper focuses on the three Italian wine-growing landscapes covered by the Convention, namely Cinque Terre, the Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont (Langhe-Roero and Monferrato) and the Prosecco Hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene. _x000D_

Fausto Di Quarto; Elena dell’Agnese
Università Milano-Bicocca

 
ID Abstract: 140