Rural landsape: the built landscape dimension

The European Landscape Convention (ELC) has paved the way to a new generation of landscape plans, which integrate for the first time the historical and cultural issues into the planning discourse officially, i.e. with mandatory typical documents. In addition, the ELC has led to a renovated appreciation of relational sets of micro-episodes dispersed in rural spaces. Fifteen years after the ELC signature, roughly a half of the Italian regions have modified and approved landscape plans with an emphasis for the analysis and design of rural areas. In this paper, we aim at presenting the preliminary results of a scrutiny of the Italian practice with respect to the methods and tools adopted to elaborate on rural landscapes. Particularly, we will work on landscape analysis and classification methods able to describe the rural built landscape, a dimension rarely developed on in the literature.