Highland CitieScape
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INTRODUCTION The importance of the territory
INTRODUCTION For the entire history, mankind showed the innate need for going up hills and climbing mountains. The reason behind it can be attributed to a strategy purpose against enemies since higher places offer bigger perspective of the territory, which leads to a better defense in case of attacks and sufficient time to be prepared. Together with this, there might be the idea of safety, being up means distance from catastrophic events like floods. But there is something even beyond the merely strategical, there is since very ancient times a certain spiritual need to go up. In classical times, in Greece's first settlements, we see the Parthenon standing out on the highest hill of Athens. The place for the cult of the gods is not located there by chance, there is a strong intention behind this. We cannot say for sure why this happened, but we see that temples, in different parts of the globe, in different cultures show the same principle. We all know that going up on hills requires a journey, but in reality it is necessary a double journey: physically and mentally. The former consists of strength, attention, reaction, and creates certain awareness of the ground. Th latter involves our personality, our motivations, and a pure desire to reach a goal which lead to a different meaning behind this simple act. This phenomenon evolved within the passing of the years. In 1818, the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich painted the famous" Wanderer in the fog ". This becomes the most recognized painting of the artist becoming one of the masterpieces of Romanticism. The picture shows a man standing upon a cliff with his back to the viewer. The wanderer stares a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog with ridges and forests emerging from it. This few elements created a sort of fashion between the upper classes of the century, creating a new man icon representing a change in the culture: escaping from the mundane and getting involved by the nature were an expression of wealth and audacity, along with the rewarding sense of achievement from the top. Robert Macfarlane commented how mountain climbing has been viewed in the Western world since the Romantic era, defining the picture as the "archetypical image of the mountain-climbing visionary". He stated also that the idea of admiration for standing on a mountain top barely existed in earlier centuries [1].
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