ABSTRACT
In the literature in English on landscape and identity, England is often taken as a paradigm case of the significance of a certain idealized landscape as symbolic of national identity (see, for example, Lowenthal1994). It is invariably a rural landscape. Recent research in Scandinavia, Finland, and Switzerland seems to back this up (Kaufmann and Zimmer 1998; Jones and Olwig 2008). In this broad overview of the role of landscape in political identities I wish to challenge the English model by showing how much of a singular social construction it has been, representing in fact a narrow regional ideal within England if that, and suggesting through use of the Italian case a more complex association between landscape and national identity that sometimes privileges identities other than the national (or, more specifically, ones that fail to become national) or that have contradictory connotations because of the power of past associations that point away from the national. My message, more evocative than definitive as befits a broad overview, is that the role of landscape in national identity should be related to the specifics of national-state formation rather than presumed to be invariant across all cases. In other words, the politics of landscape in particular cases is what should concern us, not identifying and celebrating landscape elements that presumably represent the natural flowering of all particular national identities.
