Every movement has its own time, but never before have the movements of people been so fast and accessible, the distances so reachable, feelings so boundless.
But every means of transport has its own peculiar rhythm and specific feeling: the view out of a train window, the oval of the airplane over the clouds, the rocking of the horizon in a boat, the speed of the landscape in a car. And then, a motorcycle or a bicycle.
Michel de Certeau said that a train window brings on nostalgia. What feeling does walking evoke? Walking is completely different. The landscape surrounds the movement completely, it’s not two-dimensional, there are the smells, you can trip, you can independently decide how fast to go, when to stop, when to start again.
Walking is a dimension of movement characterised by slowness. That slow time that comes from afar and immediately brings the walker closer to all those who have already travelled those same paths, always and only on foot.
Better shoes? Definitely. Clearer air? Maybe. But the paths of the shepherds, Basilian monks and bandits have remained, always the same. They have gone unchanged, not been altered by any technology, and allow for an experience with no specific time aside from that of moving.
If paths connecting natural resources are the classic itineraries of parks, the presence of remnants and spaces for regeneration creates required stops among environmental resources.
This is the only way that the pathways of the past will overlap with those of the present. The mapping of remnants and of humanised places allow us to imagine lines crossing the natural space, and to recreate the relationship between nature and subjectivity.
Starting from the existing network of paths, this research intends to investigate existing and new trajectories, in order to discover, classify and valorise places of natural, historical and anthropological interest.
