Note in tema di prospetto, veduta e panorama in diritto romano

The essay investigates the elaboration of the legal notions of view, panorama and landscape, and its protection, in the Roman jurisprudence and in the imperial legislation of the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. While jurists take into consideration only the prospectus, through the instrument of voluntary servitude, and in any case posed by the neighbours owners of the funds, in the exclusive perspective of reconciling their conflicting interests, the imperial legislation demonstrates an increased and specific sensitivity for the view and the panorama, which are protected not only as an accessory value of the property, but due to a more careful consideration of the needs of the human soul related to the pleasure deriving from the contemplation of the landscape. More specifically, if Zeno's legislation sets out a series of urban planning requirements, many of which, moreover, expressly considered derogable from any agreements between the owners concerned, under Justinian, on the other hand, the need to adequately enhance the landscape understood as good in itself and the imperial administration directly and immediately assumes the task of safeguarding the landscape through a discipline that is basically mandatory for private individuals, on the background of a conception of vicinitas now totally devoid of the solidarity and community dimension typical of the Republican age.