World Heritage and Contamination. Culture, Creativity, Contamination. Le Vie dei Mercanti XVIII International Forum

This contribution aims to investigate the multiple possibilities of protection of an Intangible Cultural Heritage by examining the landscape of the Island of Pantelleria. On this small area (about 8000 hectares in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea between Africa and Europe) two UNESCO elements are present: “Traditional agricultural practice of cultivating the “vite ad alberello” (head-trained bush vines) of the community of Pantelleria”, and the art of dry stone walling. Protecting and enhancing these intangible elements is one of the goals of the recent National Park which has begun, in collaboration with the Department of Architecture of the University of Roma Tre, to identify the most suitable actions for this purpose. Protection strategies necessarily go through transformations and plans: each intangible heritage has a landscape that corresponds to it, and every landscape, as a “living” heritage entity, remains only if the local community continues to carry out its traditional activities. Therefore, what the intangible assets require in order to remain in the present is an active protection, and not in a constraining-normative way. All actions must be aimed at increasing the vitality and profitability of the community’s activities. Beginning with a socio-economic analysis of Pantelleria’s agriculture and society, this contribution investigates the vulnerability of the rural dry stone landscape of Pantelleria and outlines a strategic framework of initiatives aimed at the protection of the two intangible assets identified by the WHL.