The woman who created the idea of landscape [1]
Vittoria Calzolari is pictured carefully rearranging the plants in her home, as was her wont, an echo of her career working to provide green spaces for cities. The photo is almost a manifesto of concealment; a human behind the non-human. Known as a very modest woman, Calzolari was always hidden behind the work she created. Almost no other photograph of her is to be found, even though she held public office for many years, and was an active and engaged architect, urbanist and professor. [2]
Calzolari’s agency expanded from education to the social, and from public engagement to legislation. This interdisciplinary impact is reflected in the strong interlocking of theory and practice in her oeuvre, and in her conception of landscape. Calzolari defined a new discipline that she named ‘paesistica.’ [3] Paesistica understands the landscape as continuously evolving, taking the historical process of its creation into account. [4] It invites an interdisciplinary approach, looking at the landscape though different eyes.
Water always played an important role for Calzolari, as both a resource and an indispensable system for the planning and interpretation of territorial landscape. [5] Her first encounter with water as a territorial and city-boundary element was in her childhood in Mogadiscio, Somalia, where her father worked on the construction of the port. [6]
One of Calzolari’s most representative works is her project for the park of the Via Appia. [7] In this project, the two spheres of landscape design and preservation are strongly linked to one another. The continuity of the great dimensions [8] of the park had been destroyed over the centuries. [9]
The objective of the project was therefore to recreate the formal unity of the park, restoring the sense of grandiosity and reevoking the memories associated with it.
Together with her husband, [10] Calzolari wrote a study, Il Verde per la città. [11] This later supported legislators in the formulation of a decree [12] on urban standards that still, today, determines the amount of green space that every Italian citizen must have access to in the city.
Even though Calzolari’s projects, publications and roles [13] are very different from one another, a golden thread can clearly be identified: the importance of water and green spaces, and a sensibility to historical, artistic and environmental patrimony, as well as her intellectual and political commitment.
Image Credit: Unknown
1. Erbani, Francesco. “La signora che creò l‘idea di paesaggio.” La Repubblica. 4 December 2012. (Accessed 20 July 2022) Link.
2. Calzolari was a professor at the Universities of Rome and Naples.
3. This term differs from the often used ‘paesaggistica.’ Both terms are translated the same way in English, to mean landscaping or landscape design.
4. Mora, Alfonso Álvarez, ed. Paesistica = Paisaje, Vittoria Calzolari, Paesistica = Paisaje. Ediciones Universidad de Valladolid, 2012. 17-20.
5. Ibid.: 26.
6. Ibid.: 36.
7. This project was initiated in 1973 by the non-profit organisation Italia Nostra, of which Vittoria Calzolari was a member for many years, dedicated to the protection and promotion of the country’s historical, artistic and environmental patrimony. Calzolari strongly shared with Italia Nostra the approach to urban planning focusing on the preservation of historic architecture.
8. 3000 hectares.
9. The park was decimated through the addition of fences, construction and traffic. Mora, ed. Paesistica = Paisaje, Vittoria Calzolari, Paesistica = Paisaje, 183-207.
10. She met her husband while working on one of her first projects in the context of the national competition for economic and social housing in Naples.
11. Calzolari, Vittoria, and Mario Ghio. Il Verde per la città. De Luca Editore, 1961. The book was commissioned for the Olympics in Rome.
12. Decreto Ministeriale n. 1444, 2 April 1968.
13. Calzolari was a professor, architect, urbanist and public officer.
