In this work the application of remote sensing for landslide detection and mapping is described. Among Earth Observation (EO) techniques optical and radar images are very effective tools for these applications since very high spatial resolution obtained by optical systems (currently in the order of tens of centimeters) and by the launching of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors, purposely built for interferometric applications with revisiting times of few days. In this paper the potentiality of both satellite optical and radar data is explored in a selected case study, analyzing different slope instability processes at different scales. Thanks to them and to the support of existing bibliography, the main advantages and disadvantages are ...