Giardino e sacro nell'Italia preromana. Vegetazione, paesaggio tra cultura e religione. 2015. illud. (b/w). 306 p. Paper bd. - In Italian.

In pre-Roman Italy, an organic evolutionary path links the spontaneous environment to its transformation into anthropized landscape, and then to the sacred garden: starting from the transformations of the environment activated in the protohistoric phases, it is possible to follow how in the Italic area new social needs have generated the formation of an increasingly widespread humanized landscape. Human intervention on the territory, especially in the Etruscan culture, is revealed to be conditioned by religious fear and therefore by the recourse to rules, dictated by the gods themselves, who find in the sacred division of the cosmos, the limitatio, a pervasive canon, the central pivot of the Etruscan discipline. The delimitation of spaces, which between the civil and sacred spheres, also pervades the architecture of the palaces of orientalizing and archaic Italy, is at the basis of the "cutout", in the landscape, of the sacred woods, which remain spaces outside the common activities civil and productive, bound and consecrated to the divinities who continue to govern within them - as well as over the original natural environment. But even in the sacred green spaces the aesthetic and eurythmic wills gradually take hold: thus the "garden of the gods" is born.