Mamma Etna

Pietro Olioso

Landscape, like art, holds the exceptional power to trigger mind-blowing sensations, to tease the most sensitive sides of our inner life. Indeed, it impacts not only gestures, habits, and social dynamics, to the extent of influencing regional economies too, but it also involves the sphere of emotions and memory. Even if risking to sound romantic, it is worth addressing the poetic and sentimental aspects of landscape, which are inevitably included in a real discussion about the tools of design. While undertaking a revival of the Sturm un Drang, it may be useful to approach these blurred topics in connection with an extreme but glaring case study, analyzing the tie between Etna and its inhabitants. You can feel Etna in your guts, it has a voice, it induces a constant state of tension that molds an explosive but basically zen population. Etna is a landscape that changes quickly, where volcanic rocks can cause destruction but also fertilize the ground and are employed in building construction. It is impossible to live with Etna without feeling anxiety, astonishment, or similar emotions. These kinds of sensations are involved, even if in a less dramatic way, in the landscapes that we inhabit every day, which happen to be complex systems made of natural and anthropic dynamics, of physical elements but also meanings. Truth is that landscapes manage to interact with our most human feelings.