The urban being between environment and landscape. On the old town as an emerging subject

The landscape units of the Sicilian mountainous inland, as for the case of Petralia Soprana, are marked by the presence of ancient urban centres controlling the agricultural territory, from which they derived their own wealth, and to which they conferred landscape significance. The unity between economy and landscape has been interrupted by the radical transformation of the socio-economic structure and the technologic progress, which have eroded the consistency between structures and superstructures. We propose an assessment approach based on a synthesis of semiotic and phenomenological view. The approach mainly focuses on the basic concepts and contents of the valuation process that can be assumed as the theoretical premise for the operational tool.