Narrating landscape: Nature in Italian public service broadcasting, between the environment and tradition

This article aims to detect and analyse televisual discourses about nature and landscape, relying on a qualitative sample of programmes from Italian public service broadcasting collected in November 2022. The focus lies in how the Italian landscape is expressed through socio-narrative representations. In this context, the position in the schedule, the narrative structure, and the actors and themes are considered. The article also questions whether and how environmental issues are handled in the sample programmes, investigating the presence of such issues and the type of discourse in which they are embodied. Overall, the socio-narrative representation of landscape in the sample reveals the structure of a journey through the Italian territory; it also highlights three main thematic features: nature, environmental issues and tradition. Moreover, three modes of presenting nature are found: nature as a background, as a topic and as a problem.