Il libro

Topophilia The Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens: places, writing and encounters offers a concise account of the over thirty-year history of the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens, a Prize that has the unique feature of being dedicated to a ‘place’ and is supported by resolute research work involving in-depth study, travel and in-field exploration that sometimes leads to quite unexpected encounters.
Although steered by a set of regulations and a clear-cut methodological approach, the Prize emerges here as an appraisal in progress, which, as revealed in the early pages of the book, gives prominence to words such as peregrination, topophilia and discovery. The geographical range of the places awarded the Prize between 1990 and 2024, in and well beyond Europe, is apparent from the selection of texts drawn from the citations written by the jury for each place designated, describing its principal characteristics and explaining why it was chosen, together with illustrations that evoke its distinctive features. The book unfolds as a sort of travel diary that from the beginning takes the form of a collective discussion, an exchange of insights provided by necessarily diverse disciplines, deliberately brought together to stimulate dynamic research in the field of landscape studies and constantly to challenge the sense of the word ‘garden,’ which the name of the Prize conserves and nurtures as an evolving concept.