Everyday Tuscany and the Politics of Landscape Purification

Today the Tuscan landscape is perceived as the landscape of perfection. Refurbished farmhouses stand out in postcards, movies, and advertising brochures for the purity and simplicity of their geometries, for the quality of their (rigorously traditional) materials, and for their relationship with the landscape, which seems to correspond to the utopian ideal of an harmonious symbiosis between man and nature. However such landscape is the consequence of a process of purification and of authentic cleaning up of all the spatial expressions of everyday life – hovels and canopies done with shanty and reused materials, architectural superfetations, creative space appropriations – which historically featured the living environment in the Tuscan countryside. The purification of everyday Tuscany started after the abandonment of the countryside by peasants after WWII is largely the consequence of urban and regional policies which had the effect of turning into reality an utopian and idealized view of the Region promoted by hegemonic classes and by foreign expatriates living in Tuscany from the 19th Century onwards. The paper aims at showing the historical inconsistency of such purified Tuscany, stressing the sharp contrasts between yesterday’s and today’s uses of space. It also intends to highlight the effects that the politics of landscape purification is producing in terms of ‘social purification’.