building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

danger. This reasoning gave rise to a specific chapter within the pages of Man and
Nature, dedicated to the importance of conserving the physical aspects of the
landscape. Thus, Marsh fired the budding feelings aiming to protect the natural
environment.
The various cultural influences, to which the Americans were subject, created a
specific, intellectual processing of the landscape, 270 the practical results of which
turned into precise, political action. It was no mere chance that the measures in
favour of the institution of the first American national parks followed the
publication of texts, such as those of Thoreau and Marsh, at the same time as
Olmsted’s first landscaping operations.
However, attention to nature arose from very different suppositions from those
worrying the Europeans. Paolo D’Angelo, a lecturer in aesthetics and attentive
enthusiast for landscape topics, has recently highlighted how the love for nature,
which had developed during the eighteenth century in America, had encouraged an
interest in the physical and biological aspects of the environment:
The ideal of the Wilderness fairly soon produced the consecration of
wide, untouched spaces as the heart and symbol of the Nation [...]. The
presence of very large, spaces untouched by man, and at the same time
the strong push to colonise and cultivate enormous territories created
concern for wild nature which, for a long time at least, found no
verification this side of the Atlantic. In fact, in Europe the love for nature
began as love for the beauty of nature, for the interweaving of history
and nature, or of nature and culture. From the moment it became the
object of public intervention, under the first protection laws, the
landscape of our continent was a cultural landscape that is a landscape
steeped in historic, literary and artistic memories. 271
The natural scenes of the Atlantic states soon became tourist destinations, where it
was possible to observe what artists were trying to immortalise to their best artistic
and technical ability For example; the American success of the techniques of the
diorama and panorama is symptomatic of the role played by the landscape and by
270 See SCHAMA, Simon, Landscape and memory, London, Harper Collins, 1995 (it. tr. by Paola
Mazzarelli, Paesaggio e memoria, Milan, Mondadori, 1997)
271 D’ANGELO, Paolo, Filosofia del Paesaggio, [Philosophy of the Landscape] Quodlibet, Macerata,
2010, p.26
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