1 LANDSCAPE PROTECTION 1.1 The evolution in landscape protection Landscape protection has been widely debated in all industrialized countries. In Italy, one of the central points of the discussion among planners and other experts has been the necessity to define landscape in order to implement legislation safeguards. The country has a long lasting tradition in landscape safeguard, starting from the first modern legislation, issued in 1922, traditionally rooted in a concept mainly based on visual aspects. Safeguard has been intertwined with the more robust practice aimed at the protection of isolated cultural heritage items, mainly archaeological sites, historical buildings and monuments. This concept has evolved substantially but it is still present in current legislation. The European Landscape Convention, signed in Florence in 2000, deeply innovated the approach toward landscape protection. Particularly, it takes into account recent changes in the settlement system. Agriculture, forestry, industrial production as well as residential areas, transport, infrastructure, tourism and recreation are in many cases accelerating the transformation of the landscape, posing new pressures and threats on it. One of the most relevant challenges to landscape is urban sprawl in its various arrangements (Lucy & Philips 1997, Zhang 2001). A paradigm shift is characterising the study of landscape that has evolved from conventional reductionistic and mechanistic approaches to holistic and organismic ones of wholeness, connectedness and ordered complexity (Naveh 2000). These new visions proposed by geographers but now shared by other researchers are recently permeating also landscape protection legislations. Several studies based on GIS applications has been produced on landscape complexity (Papadimitriou 2002), holistic interpretation (Antrop & Van Eetvelde 2000) or landscape evaluation (Lee et al. 1999) among others. From several contributions it emerges that the use of GIS is not only a challenging task but also a tool that can bring conceptual an operational innovations in this field. The Use of GIS in Landscape Protection Plan in Sicily F. Martinico Università degli Studi di Catania, Dipartimento Astra S. D. La Rosa Università degli Studi di Catania, Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica ABSTRACT: Landscape protection is a challenging task for planners, considering the number of conceptual and operational problems involved. These include not only the management of a considerable amount of data, indispensable for describing the features of a landscape but also the assessment of its value, risk and vulnerability. In addition, landscape protection has to take into account norms and regulations that are country specific. In Italy, several aspects have to be addressed due to the complexity of the existing legislation. This paper describes a landscape planning experience that has been conducted by using GIS. The proposed case is located in Sicily where landscape protection is a widely debated issue, considering the relevance of cultural and natural heritage. The use of GIS has revealed particularly useful in order to cope with two issues: the understanding of the main threats to landscape, mainly sprawl, and the assessment of landscape value and vulnerability.