Proteggere un patrimonio 'vivente'. Strategie di sopravvivenza per i paesaggi rurali tradizionali

ural cultural landscapes are a kind of cultural landscape, identified by the World Heritage Committee UNESCO in the Operational Guidelines (February 1996: 11, Paragraph 39) as "continuing landscapes". They result from an initial social and economic imperative (agricultural, pastoral and forestry activities) and have developed their present form by association with and in response to their natural environment. Thanks to its history, geology, topography and climate, Italy has an invaluable heritage of very different kinds of rural landscapes, biodiversity and identities. But this heritage is disappearing, threatened for decades by the crisis of the familiar agriculture, the abandonment of the countryside, the development of 'industrialized' agriculture, the advance of the woods and the urban sprawl. A new rural landscape is coming into being, made of serial plains drawn by intensive one-crop and deserted mountain areas. Each day we are losing the agricultural areas where the soil contains more values, culture, ancient traditions. Moreover, together with the culture, when we lose rural landscapes we are also losing environmental security. What tools can we use to protect this kind of living heritage? This text focuses on the role of the architectural and landscape project in the valorization strategy of cultural rural landscapes, starting from a case study from World Heritage Sites: the terracements and the Cultural Route "dei saperi della vite ad alberello della comunità di Pantelleria".