Visual and Tourist Dimensions of Trentino's Borderscape

Boundaries leave signs on territories, immediately referable to their own geopolitical function. These marks become either objects of human perception and are also subject of political representation, passing through a complex process of re-definition that concerns both a functional transformation and a geopolitical narrative. It refers directly to the relationship between historic particularities and territorial imagery, composing the semantic structure of peculiar “political landscape”, which we defined “signs-stratification”, considering it as one of the most interesting ways to understand the relationships between landscapes and geopolitical action, whose main aspect is the visual persistence of some elements directly referable to their geopolitical functions. The chapter focuses on the “signs-stratification” process in two regions crossed by the Trentino’s Southern border, where each historical phase has left several signs on the local political landscape, such as military paths, forts, war cemeteries, monuments, and changes in the local toponymy. During the fieldwork we adopted an hybrid methodology able to take in account this peculiarity and the primary role played by vision in world knowledge and in the construction of geographical images. In this specific case, the importance of visual dimensions is due not only to the simple consideration that the border is built and materialized on the territory through visual elements, but also to the deeper consideration that its declination in the landscape is constituted by an interaction of perceivable signs, material products and immaterial artifacts. Adopting techniques of Visual Sociology, such as photo-elicitation interviews an photo observation on the field, first it came out how local establishments have transformed visual signs, related to Trentino’s borderscape, into fundamental sources for local territory promotion, secondly how the visual language of this promotional material have became a part of the geopolitical narrative