Awareness, Identity, and Place Attachment Among Young People Living in a Calabrian Reclamation Landscape

Abstract

Over the centuries, the reclamation of marshy areas has significantly transformed the Italian rural landscape. The Piana di Sibari (North of Calabria) represents a paradigmatic case of this process, because the current landscape is the result of a vast rural transformation. This paper discusses the results of a survey conducted to evaluate students’ knowledge and perception of this “Reclaim Lands” landscape, focusing on their emotional connection and awareness of its cultural and environmental heritage. The survey was administered to 149 middle school and 177 high school students. The study aims to investigate awareness and perception of landscape among mid-to-late adolescents living in the Piana di Sibari, highlighting the key aspects of the relationship between students and the places they inhabit, recognizing the catalytic role of the landscape in fostering a sense of belonging and identity. The results of this survey encourage reflection on a cultural shift that integrates ecological, social, and cultural perspectives, aligned with the European Landscape Convention, advocating for greater investment in youth education and participation to promote active citizenship and chart a course toward a fairer and more sustainable society.

1. Introduction

The reclamation of marshy areas has profoundly modified the landscape of numerous regions across the peninsula. Italy, characterized by the widespread presence of marshlands, underwent a gradual reclamation process that began systematically in the 18th century and extended well beyond the mid-20th century [1]. The reclamation of the Piana di Sibari (Plain of Sibari), in the province of Cosenza (Calabria, Italy), is a paradigmatic example of this process, because the current rural landscape, considered one of the most lush and productive in southern Italy, is the result of a vast transformation effort in which Italian institutions and the local population have participated together [2].

In the current literature, there is growing interest in studies focusing on the transformations of rural landscapes and the causes that have influenced their social, economic, and cultural processes [3,4,5,6]. These studies fall within the framework of many disciplines (e.g., ecology, hydrology, history, economy, architecture, and anthropology) capable of decoding both tangible and intangible signs, analyzing territorial transformation processes from both contemporary and historical perspectives [7,8]. This approach aims to highlight both anthropic and natural frameworks, revealing the complexity and intrinsic meaning of places [9].

Recently, a study on an Italian reclaimed landscape showed the relationship between people and the landscape in which they live, focusing on landscape as an identity construct, whereby local residents reconnect experience, identity, traditions, and the historical meaning of the territory with knowledge of its functional features [10]. Studies like this enable the recognition and reconstruction of all the components that make up the intricate mosaic of the landscape, identifying cultural, environmental, and economic elements that embody a rich set of identity values. These elements have the potential to reactivate endogenous resources, fostering their investment in processes aimed at enhancing territorial planning, and encouraging dynamic participation in the programmatic choices of national and local governments [11].

The aforementioned topic is encompassed within the European Landscape Convention, ratified in Florence in October 2000. This international agreement defines the landscape as a specific portion of territory, whose configuration reflects the interaction of both natural and human factors [12]. This complex interaction is evident in Italy, where, except for rare wilderness areas [13], the landscape has been shaped over time by the relentless action of nature and the constant work of people adapting it to meet human needs. Conceived in this way, as a result of the fusion between nature and culture, the landscape takes the form of a dynamic phenomenon in constant fluidity, in which natural forces and human intervention influence each other [14].

Moreover, in the Council of Europe Convention, the perspective of local communities is also considered. These communities contribute to the definition of the landscape through processes of interpretation and the attribution of meanings associated with the territory that serves as the backdrop to their daily lives. The social perception of the landscape highlights the engagement of local communities and their ability to undertake actions and policies for territorial development. In this field, the European Community recommends fostering initiatives to enhance knowledge and awareness of cultural and environmental heritage among younger generations [15].

Recently, the landscape has gained increasing relevance in education, particularly in relation to sustainability, citizenship, and heritage. The relationship between understanding the landscape and the ability to act upon it is considered fundamental for fostering awareness, responsibility, and sustainable transformation. However, landscape education encompasses a wide range of pedagogical approaches, influenced by the complexity of the concept itself, disciplinary perspectives, and cultural contexts, often leading to diverging or even contradictory practices [16].

The notion of landscape is inherently complex and holistic, embracing multiple perspectives that often exist in tension with one another [17]. One key polarity lies between nature and culture, distinguishing approaches that emphasize the physical and ecological characteristics of the landscape from those that highlight its cultural and heritage values. Another fundamental axis is the contrast between objectivity and subjectivity—on one side, approaches that adopt a neutral, detached stance, and on the other, those that emphasize personal perception and embodied experience. This duality is intrinsic to the very concept of landscape, as it is simultaneously “the thing and the image of the thing” [18]. Landscapes are both material and symbolic, visible and invisible, as they involve not only tangible physical features, but also the meanings and values attributed to them by observers [19].

Amid this conceptual diversity, our study builds on Castiglioni’s fourpartite model for landscape interpretation, which offers four complementary readings: denotative (focused on landscape elements), connotative (perceptions and meanings), interpretative (natural and human influences), and chronological (changes over time and towards the future) [20].

In the forward-looking perspective, the European Landscape Convention serves as a guiding reference, advocating for a dual perspective on landscape: both as a tool for enhancing human well-being, and as an object of stewardship. This vision emphasizes public participation in shaping and safeguarding landscapes of quality [21,22,23]. Inspired by this approach, various educational practices seek to strengthen the role of citizens as active custodians of the landscape, recognizing it as a value in itself [24].

In this regard, the present research adopts the perspective of the pedagogy of landscape. It seeks to highlight the contemporary debate on landscape, where the issue of democracy plays a fundamental role [25,26]. By addressing the complexity of this issue through an insightful analysis, it seeks to enhance considerations of the political dimension of landscapes in educational activities, enriching, rather than excluding, other more traditional conceptions of landscape. The study aims to investigate awareness and perception of landscape, in addition to highlighting sense of identity and place attachment, among young people of Piana di Sibari, through the administration of a questionnaire. In particular, the following questions are addressed: is the educational path sufficient to develop an awareness of the history of the landscape? In the construction of common local identity, does the consideration of the natural landscape prevail over that of the cultural landscape, or do both contribute in the same way? Can the landscape represent a tool to support citizen education?

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Study Area

The Piana di Sibari is a fertile area located in the North of Calabria (southern Italy). The plain experiences a hot-summer Mediterranean climate, characterized by warm, dry summers and mild, rainy winters, as classified by Köppen–Geiger [27]. The area is notable for its considerable temperature variations throughout the year, creating dynamic weather patterns. Average daytime temperatures peak at 29 °C in August and drop to around 13 °C in February. Moreover, it receives a moderate annual precipitation of 668 mm, with significant seasonal shifts. December, the wettest month, sees an average of 96 mm of rainfall over 12 days, whereas July, the driest month, records just 13 mm across 3 days. These seasonal contrasts shape diverse climatic experiences throughout the year [28]. This plain, nestled between the Pollino Massif to the north and the Sila Plateau to the south, and bordered by the Ionian Sea to the east and the slopes of the southern Apennines to the west (Figure 1), features a well-developed sequence of late Quaternary marine and coastal terraces shaped by the interplay of sea level fluctuations and tectonic uplift. Along these terraces, alluvial and fluvial sediments, resulting from the confluence of several rivers, including the Crati and Coscile, as well as coastal depositional systems, formed simultaneously [29]. The Piana di Sibari, the largest lowland area in Calabria, spanning 470 km², is an interesting area of study, due to its combination of remarkable history, rich biodiversity, and agricultural resources.

The Piana di Sibari was part of the Greek settlements known as Magna Graecia, later subjected to Roman domination, and, throughout the centuries, witnessed the presence of the Byzantines and Norman cultures, leaving a layered archeological and cultural heritage. The main urban settlement was the Magna Graecia city of Sybaris, a prominent colony established around 720 BCE. Sybaris was famed for its wealth, cultural achievements, and luxurious lifestyle, which gave rise to the term “sybaritic”, referring to indulgence in pleasure and luxury. Between the 6th and 11th centuries, Rossano (which, nowadays, along with Corigliano, constitutes the most important urban area of the Piana di Sibari) played a significant role in southern Italy during the Byzantine period. The process of swamping in the Piana di Sibari began in Late Antiquity and intensified during the Middle Ages [30,31]. This phenomenon was driven by a combination of natural and human factors: the abandonment of hydraulic infrastructure, natural events, and agricultural and settlement decline [32]. This transformation turned the Piana di Sibari into a marshy area, which persisted until land reclamation projects in the 20th century. These efforts restored the plain, making it one of Italy’s most fertile agricultural regions [33]. This fertility has made the plain a key hub for agricultural activities, with prominent crops such as citrus fruits, olives, and rice. The proximity to the Ionian Sea and the Pollino and Sila National Parks creates a diverse range of important ecosystems. The area also supports coastal habitats, wetlands, and forested uplands, belonging to the European Natura 2000 network of protected natural sites [34].

2.2. Survey Design

The survey was developed based on informal meetings with the principals of middle and high schools in the Piana di Sibari area, and was later submitted to and approved by the school governing bodies. From these meetings, a strong interest emerged in assessing students’ perception of and sense of attachment to the landscape. Additionally, it was considered relevant to investigate whether, and to what extent, the school curriculum has influenced, first and foremost, students’ understanding and definition of the concept of “landscape”.

The study employed a qualitative methodology, using a semi-structured questionnaire with both open- and closed-ended questions (Supplementary File S1), which was administered in the classroom via the Google Forms^© platform, under the supervision of a teacher appointed by the principal, while ensuring the privacy of respondents. The questionnaire consisted of four sections. The first section asked each student to define what they generally understand by the term “landscape”. The second section explored whether landscape had been a topic of study during their education and, if so, which subject had covered it most extensively. The third section aimed to assess students’ perception of and attachment to their local area. To this end, questions were included about their willingness to move elsewhere and their relationship with the place they experience daily—what they appreciate about it and what they do not. The fourth section focused on evaluating students’ knowledge of their territory from environmental, cultural, historical, and economic perspectives. Additionally, a question was included to identify the most urgent environmental issues, as perceived by students. Foreign students were asked an additional question to determine whether they were born in the area under investigation or how long they have been living there.

2.3. Respondents

The survey was distributed to last-year students from middle schools and third-year students from high schools, situated in the municipality of Corigliano-Rossano. Adolescence is a crucial period for the development of place attachment, as individuals become more independent and autonomous, spending increasing amounts of time in neighborhood settings away from home. During mid-to-late adolescence, they often become more critical of their environment, and their attachment to both home and community may decrease as they explore and form new connections with other places [35]. The sample of middle school students consisted of 149 individuals aged 12 to 16 (average age 13), including 77 females and 72 males.

The high school sample comprised 177 students aged 15 to 18 (average age 16), with 92 females and 85 males. A total of 11 students were of foreign origin: 4 (3 males and 1 female) belonging to middle school, and 7 (3 males and 4 females) belonging to high school.

2.4. Data Analysis

To assess statistical significance, the parametric χ² test was applied to the responses provided by the two sample groups.

Furthermore, where the students’ responses permitted, natural language processing (NLP) techniques based on artificial intelligence and deep neural networks were employed to analyze textual data. The word cloud is a tool that distills a text corpus into a visual summary of the most frequently used words, helping to quickly identify the prominent keywords in the corpus; in our setting, the corpus is the set of responses provided by either the middle school or the high school students.

This corpus was subjected to a data-preprocessing stage, which is typical in sparse vectorial representation modeling, as it allows for cleaning and normalizing the content—this means converting everything to lowercase (so that uppercase words are not regarded separately from the lowercase words), and removing punctuation, numbers, and common terms that are not important for bearing content, known as stopwords (e.g., articles, prepositions, adverbs).

After that, the corpus was converted into a structured format, i.e., a document-to-term matrix, which is a big, yet sparse, table where each row represents a document vector, each column represents a term, and the values inside the table measure the relevance weight of a term with respect to a document. More specifically, the relevance weight for term “t” with respect to document “d” is computed according to the well-known term-frequency inverse-document-frequency (tf.idf) scoring function, which is proportional to the number of occurrences the term “t” has in document “d”, and inversely proportional to the number of documents in the corpus in which the term “t” appears (at least once).

From this matrix, the terms with both a length and tf.idf score of at least two were selected and used to generate the word cloud, where words appear larger if they are used more frequently in the text.

Moreover, a language model from the Sentence Transformers framework was utilized, an advanced tool for generating sentence embeddings, which are numerical vector representations of text (the responses to open-ended questions) that encode meaningful semantic information [36], enabling various analysis tasks, such as semantic search, clustering, or paraphrase detection. By comparing pairs of embeddings based on the cosine similarity measure, sentences with similar meanings were identified as corresponding to those embeddings close to each other in the numerical space.

To visually represent the responses, UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection), a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique, was used. This method maps the topology of high-dimensional data into a two- or three-dimensional space, allowing for graphical visualization. In more detail, UMAP is based on the principle of manifold learning, as it assumes that data points lie on a low-dimensional manifold embedded in a high-dimensional space. UMAP first constructs a weighted graph representation of the data by defining how each data point is connected to its neighbors, where the similarity between data points is determined using a fuzzy simplicial complex. Then, UMAP learns a lower-dimensional representation by preserving the structure of this graph. Finally, it minimizes the difference between the high-dimensional and low-dimensional graphs using stochastic gradient descent optimization.

UMAP has a number of parameters to be set: in our context, the similarity between data points was computed based on cosine similarity, which is appropriate for text embeddings; the number of nearest neighbors to be considered for each data point was set to a low regime, in order to preserve mainly local structure (good for visual clustering); moreover, the parameter controlling how closely UMAP packs data points together in the low-dimensional space was also set to a low regime, in order to obtain tighter visual clusters, preserving fine details [37]. An overview of the main steps of the research is shown in Figure 2.

3. Results

We designed and developed a survey to evaluate the knowledge and perception of the “Reclaimed Lands” landscape among students in the Piana di Sibari. The survey aimed to investigate the meaning of the landscape, awareness of the area’s cultural and environmental heritage, and the emotional connection of the young people interviewed to these places.

Regarding the first section of the survey about the mean of “landscape”, “A place that evokes emotions” was the response given by approximately 20% of the respondents in both groups (20.3% of middle school students and 21.9% of high school students) when asked what came to mind when thinking of a landscape. For 18% of middle school students and 19% of high school students, this image was associated with a territory characterized by seas, mountains, and rivers.

The responses related with the second section, in which it was investigated whether landscape had been a topic of study during their education, and, if so, which subject had covered it most extensively, are represented in Figure 3 and Figure 4. Around 70% of students from both groups (71.1% middle school and 65.5% high school) reported that the topic of landscape had been discussed during their school experience (Figure 3).

Regarding this, students considered the topic most relevant to Geography and Art. These were followed by Italian, Science, and Civic Education (Figure 4).

Approximately 43% of middle school students (34.2% “a little”, 8.7% “not at all”) considered the topic of landscape less relevant to History. This contrasts with a statistically significant difference (p < 0.01), with the responses of high school students (13.6% “little”, 2.8% “not at all”).

The third section assessed students’ perception and attachment to their landscape, including questions about their willingness to move and their views on the place in which they live, highlighting what they like and dislike about it. A notable difference emerges in the responses to the question about potential difficulties in relocating to another place. Over 66% of middle school students indicated challenges in moving, whereas this percentage dropped below 50% among high school students (p < 0.01). Among those expressing discomfort with the idea, the primary reasons cited were attachment to places or people. Interestingly, younger students showed a stronger attachment to people (33%), while high school students tend to be more connected to places (38.6%). A textual analysis of the responses to the question regarding the reasons behind their ease or difficulty in relocating highlights the most frequently used words associated with the desire to stay or move. Figure 5 reveals a certain similarity in the vocabulary used by the two groups of students, though notable differences exist in the frequency of specific terms (with the font size in the figure reflecting the frequency of use within the response corpus).

Semantic analysis highlighted recurring tones in the responses:

Positive attitudes toward relocation: “I wouldn’t have difficulty moving and living in another place because I adapt quickly”, “My hometown lacks resources for the activities I’m interested in”, “I enjoy having new experiences”;

Negative attitudes toward relocation: “I love my hometown and the people who live there”, “I would struggle to move and live elsewhere because I’m accustomed to my territory”.

In Figure 6, the two-dimensional visualization of response embeddings, both in favor (“No”) and against (“Yes”) moving to another place, reveals clusters of responses corresponding to similar conditions.

These include adaptability, dissatisfaction with the current location, and the desire for new experiences, or, conversely, the desire to stay due to familial and social ties, established habits, and attachment to places.

The fourth section assessed students’ knowledge of their territory from environmental, cultural, historical, and economic perspectives, and included a question on urgent environmental issues. Regardless of age, most respondents (approximately 51%) identified the natural environment as the most appreciated feature of their territory. Second in importance was tangible (fortifications, churches, monuments) and intangible heritage (food and traditions), valued by about 15% of respondents in both groups. Notably, there was a significant difference (p < 0.01) in appreciation for the historical center, cited by 11% of middle school students, but only 4% of high school students.

When discussing what they disliked about the territory, high school students pointed to poor territorial management (23%), while younger students highlighted pollution and waste management (21%). Both groups, however, agreed in criticizing their fellow citizens, often citing a lack of civic sense as the most displeasing aspect (24%).

Regarding environmental emergencies, both groups identified marine pollution (27%) and urban waste management (24%) as the most urgent issues. A significant difference was observed in perceptions of flood risk, mentioned by 10% of middle school students and 18% of high school students (p < 0.01). Fires were perceived as an emergency by 13.5% of younger students and 10.6% of high school students.

The issue of landscape degradation was raised by only about 10% of respondents in both groups, while priorities related to the destruction of forests, wetlands, and biodiversity loss (2.5%), as well as coastal erosion (1.2%), appeared to be of little concern. When asked, “How do you feel when you see the area around your home?”, both groups gave similar responses. The most common answer was “It evokes well-being” (60% of cases), followed by “It leaves me indifferent” (37% of cases), and, lastly, “It makes me uncomfortable”, with a marginal percentage (approximately 3% of cases).

Most students, regardless of age group, identified natural areas as landmarks in their territory (approximately 32%), followed by squares, streets, and other places within inhabited areas, as well as cultural heritage sites (approximately 26%). Most students (85% of high school respondents and 77% of younger students) believed that in their municipality or neighboring ones, there is at least one place worth visiting. Among these, for both groups (an average of 53%), cultural heritage sites were the most frequently cited. Following this, but with significantly different percentages (p < 0.05), the inhabited center of Corigliano-Rossano was mentioned (24% by high school students and 13.4% by younger students). Natural areas ranked third for both groups, with an average percentage of about 16%.

The two groups of students agreed in identifying the main characteristics of the territory in which they live, describing it as “mixed” with an average percentage of 59%, and “agricultural” with about 16%. A significant difference in responses was observed among those who identified the predominant landscape as “agricultural” (15% among high school students and 8% among younger students, p < 0.05).

Considering the past, most respondents from both groups stated that the landscape used to be highly cultivated (57%), while only about 30% described it as marshy or wooded (11.5%).

More than half of the students (62% of younger students and 55% of high school students) were aware of a disease that had afflicted the local population in past centuries. Among the respondents, 70% were able to identify this disease as malaria.

Responses to the meaning of “reclamation” revealed that 60% of students associated the term with hydraulic reorganization of the territory and malaria eradication, while 8% linked it to the reclamation of polluted sites or environmental restoration of degraded areas.

Foreign-origin students were Azeri, Albanian, Pakistani, Chinese, Greek, Moroccan, Tunisian, Romanian, and Polish. Among these, three students had resided in the area since birth, four students had lived there for over seven years, and four students had been living in a municipality within the area of interest for three to seven years.

Foreign-origin respondents, though few in number and not statistically analyzed, provided noteworthy responses. Combined, 82% of these students reported feeling indifferent or uncomfortable observing the landscape surrounding their homes, while only 18% stated it “evoked well-being.”

Most foreign-origin students expressed a negative opinion about the territory they live in, with 45% describing the area as having “nothing” or identifying the people living there as its least-appreciated aspect (27%). Finally, regarding the landscape of the past, among all foreign-origin respondents, 72% indicated that the territory was “highly cultivated” and the people were not affected by any diseases related to the territory. However, only 18% were aware of the past presence of malaria. Notably, all foreign students interviewed were unfamiliar with the term “reclamation”.

4. Discussion

This study highlights the values and meanings attributed to the landscape of the Piana di Sibari by middle and high school students. It draws attention to the key aspects of the relationship between students and the places they inhabit, recognizing the catalytic role of the landscape in fostering a sense of belonging and identity.

Furthermore, the study explores the perceptual dimension, which, according to the European Landscape Convention, contributes to the “definition of landscape” through processes of interpretation and the attribution of meanings related to the territory that forms the backdrop to daily life. The Convention recognizes that the landscape (natural, rural, or urban) plays an essential role in the lives of local populations as an expression of their shared cultural and natural heritage, which is crucial to the formation of their identity [9].

The responses to the question about the idea of the landscape align with the definition in the Convention, as they evoke both an emotional component (“A place that evokes emotions”) and its physical composition (“A territory with sea, mountains, and rivers”).

This is corroborated by students’ opinions on what they find pleasing in the territory in which they live, identifying natural elements, while also recognizing the value of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Both groups of students seem not to be indifferent to the landscape of their everyday lives. The landscape surrounding their homes evokes a positive perception, contrasting with the tendency to take for granted what is part of everyday life, as theorized by Tuan in relation to the perception of place over time [38].

Moreover, most students identified points of reference in the territory, such as green areas, squares, streets in the historical center, and locations near architectural landmarks.

Conversely, for both groups of students, cultural heritage sites are highlighted as one of the most deserving types of destinations to visit, followed by the inhabited centers of Corigliano and Rossano. The statistically significant difference observed in the latter response between the two samples may indicate a greater awareness of cultural heritage value among high school students compared to middle school students.

Students appear to value anthropological places, spaces of identity and connection, rather than “non-places”, which are defined by transience and a lack of social relationships, shared histories, or signs of collective belonging [39]. Additionally, the anthropological dimension also includes local knowledge, often passed down orally, emphasizing the bond between people and their surrounding environment.

A renewed interest has recently emerged in the connection between landscape and identity, individual experience, and affective bonds with places, as evidenced by the substantial international scientific literature [40,41,42]. According to some scholars, attachment to a place affects individual well-being, and is influenced by three main indicators: the characteristics of the place, personal attributes, and the psychological processes of perception and experience of the place [43,44].

Tuan was among the first to discuss the emotional aspects of the individual–place relationship, introducing the term “topophilia” to describe the love of a place [45]. Relph similarly defined attachment to a place as an authentic and emotional connection to an environment fulfilling a fundamental human need [46]. The sample generally did not express a functional relationship, whereby the territory evokes no emotional engagement, positive or negative, nor serves as a significant identity reference. Instead, a more individual dimension emerges among high school students, while younger subjects exhibit a familial dimension.

This affective sphere contributes to a positive perception of the landscape, emphasizing rootedness and familiarity with one’s habitual living space, rather than a profound sense of belonging. The social dimension, rooted in affective relationships, can also influence positive perceptions of the landscape. This represents an interesting reversal of the issue: it seems that it is not a positive or negative perception of the landscape that affects quality of life, but rather, well-being positively shapes individuals’ view of the landscape, making it a meaningful reference [47].

More recently, several authors have analyzed the relationship between landscape and identity [34,39]. Regarding the concepts of identity and rootedness, it should be noted that knowledge of a territory, its environmental and cultural peculiarities, and its productive vocation may not be sufficient to develop a sense of identity and belonging. It is interesting to highlight the relationship between dissatisfaction with the Italian landscape of one’s living area and concerns about landscape deterioration. This indicator reflects the level of social attention toward territorial preservation. For instance, 21.3% of the Italian population (aged 14 and older) expresses dissatisfaction with the landscape of their living area, considering it “evidently degraded”, while 12.3% of Italians report concern over its deterioration. The joint analysis of these two indicators suggests that widespread perceptions of degradation may weaken, rather than strengthen, social attention to the landscape, alienating people from their connection to places [48].

Responses also highlight the role of education in raising awareness of the landscape and its historical–social and environmental specificities. In 70% of cases, students in both groups reported having studied the topic of landscape during their school experience, particularly within Geography, Italian, Sciences, and artistic disciplines. These same disciplines are the most commonly used in non-formal landscape education projects carried out by non-governmental organizations, museums, private entities, public–private partnerships, and offices of the Cultural Heritage Ministry. This reinforces the idea that the landscape could serve as a valuable conceptual bridge between scientific and humanistic disciplines [16], and underlines the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature of the topic.

Moreover, the cross-disciplinary teaching of Civic Education is of great relevance, as evidenced by the responses to the questionnaire administered to students. Recently reintroduced in Italian schools, Civic Education aims to foster knowledge and understanding of the structural, social, economic, legal, civic, and environmental aspects of society [49]. It connects landscape themes—and sustainability more broadly—to the preparation of future adults, enabling them to actively participate in their communities and contribute to the social development of citizenship [50].

The pedagogical role of school, implicitly recognized in the questionnaire responses, aligns with the European Community’s recommendations to promote education about landscape awareness, as a repository of cultural and environmental heritage.

This study therefore offers interesting perspectives on pedagogical, anthropological, and social points of view. The responses from the interviewed students regarding poor land management and a lack of civic sense, as contributing factors to the degradation of the Piana di Sibari landscape, reveal a certain distrust towards institutions and their own community.

Notable differences emerge in responses from foreign-origin students, which deviate markedly from their Italian peers. Foreign students appear to view the surrounding territory negatively, showing indifference toward the landscape visible from their homes and expressing limited appreciation for their host territory, primarily due to the people and their mentality. They also demonstrate limited knowledge of the historical landscape compared to their Italian peers. It might be interesting to understand whether this lack of knowledge could, in some way, be attributed to scholastic programs that may not have provided sufficient information about the historical dynamics of the local landscape, which Italian peers might instead have acquired information on through extracurricular channels. Indeed, according to Branduini and Castiglioni, Italy lacks a comprehensive strategy for education on landscapes [51].

School programs that facilitate understanding and appreciation of natural, cultural, and historical resources must be complemented by strategies involving various stakeholders (non-governmental organizations, consumers, students, policymakers, researchers, and associations) aimed at fostering active citizenship and developing a genuine heritage education and identity [52].

In the Italian context, recent papers refer to the European Landscape Convention, particularly, its recommendation on promoting landscape awareness through education [12]. Cepollaro and Zenon examine the “learning devices” designed to spark interest in the landscape and foster participatory, cooperative, and responsible attitudes [53]. Castiglione and Cisani explore pedagogical practices that focus on the complexity of landscape concepts and the issue of landscape democracy in both school and non-formal education [16]. Michelutti and Guaran examine how educational initiatives contribute to understanding and fostering democratic approaches to landscape, while critically examining the concept of a “democratic landscape”. Their research highlights the vital role of education in cultivating awareness of the landscape as a common good, and underscores landscape democracy as an outcome of collaborative and inclusive processes that transcend conventional participatory clichés [54].

Efforts are underway to curb the loss of place identities and recognizability, which leads to perceiving territories as empty containers for diverse activities and impacts [9]. In this context, the European Community, through the “European Biodiversity Strategy for 2020”, has recognized the essential value of biodiversity and its crucial role in promoting human well-being and supporting economic prosperity via natural capital and ecosystem services. Among the four ecosystem services (supporting life, regulating, provisioning, and cultural) [55], cultural services ensure cultural diversity, knowledge systems, spiritual and religious values, educational and esthetic aspects, emotions, social relations, and a sense of place [56]. These services are capable of fostering greater awareness among young people about the value of their territory, promoting a lasting sense of belonging and responsibility toward their local community.

5. Conclusions

Attention to the landscape and care for the territory and environment require significant investment in human capital, to initiate fundamental changes from the grassroots through “action-research” that is capable of questioning the status quo and replacing tacitly accepted values and behaviors with alternative principles, choices, and actions [57]. A paradigm shift is needed, one that does not see the future as an extension of the past, but rather marks a clear discontinuity [58]. This requires involving younger generations in community life through youth participation programs and active citizenship projects, stimulating creativity and innovation.

A new cultural approach integrating ecological, social, economic, and cultural aspects aligns with the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Signed in 2015 by all 193 member states, the agenda’s seventeen declared goals (addressing issues such as quality education, combating poverty and social and gender inequalities, access to justice, building responsible and effective institutions at all levels, fighting climate change, reducing pollution, and conserving biodiversity) [59] represent the necessary milestones for charting a course toward a fairer and more sustainable society.