The value of the landscape in the individual and collective perception through the transformation of postal cartography

The geographical distances, as is known, are not only geometric but also qualitative: the perception of spatial extension is intimately connected to the time necessary to travel it. A relationship witnessed by cartography, a representation constitutively linked to time (suffice it to think about the connection between the calculation of longitude and the chronometer invention), and a tool for movement and territorial communication. An important example for this aspect is the road map, focussing on the depiction of roads, paths, remarkable places and post stations, which can be defined, in a figurative sense, a kind of “mapping of time”. This is the case of the Peutinger Tabula, the “spiritual” travel (with the guides to the Holy Land or to Rome), the commercial cartography (nautical cartography) but, furthermore, with the improvement of road links, the modern cartography (referring to authors such as J. Metellius, C. Stigliola, M.A. Baudrand, G. Cantelli) and that of XVIII-XIX century (of chorographic, postal, military, tourism type), until you get to the maps of today and to the Information and Communication Technology. A development that, in addition to witnessing the actual “reduction” of the planet – including the space-time compression (Harvey, 1990) and the separation between social relationships and places of interaction (Giddens, 1990) – makes explicit the link between the individual and collective perception of space-time distances and the landscape value, the whose environmental, historical and territorial resources are today threatened by an excessive acceleration of production rates and of the lifestyle of the urban population of the planet.