Abstract
Enhancing Historic sites and Landscapes: an Integrated Approach.
Heleni Porfyriou
National Research Council of Italy, Institute for the Conservation and Valorisation of Cultural Heritage (CNR -I CVBC).
Historic cities, archaeological sites, cultural landscapes are often subjects of different valorisation policies.
The “integrated valorisation”, promoted in different projects by the CNR-ICVBC- Rome, is a multi-task, multi-scale approach for enhancing tangible and intangible heritage (monuments, cities, archaeological sites) contextualised in a broader historic landscape.
The definition of coherent or homogeneous landscapes is the first step towards this direction. Follows the identification of appropriate sub-themes – characteristic of each territory and based on shared aspects relative to the history, political dominion, geographical configuration, culture, intangible values, building typologies and materials, etc -- which may reveal stratified identities on the basis of which enhancement networks will be promoted. Finally a typo-morphological urban and architectural/archaeological analysis concludes the analytical process, which can be enriched by a study of the use of public spaces and of the buildings’ state of conservation.
On the basis of this analytical approach and of the rich material gathered and appropriately organised in digital data banks are, subsequently, identified methodologies for implementing conservation policies, supporting integrated valorisation, or promoting comparative research.
Comprising nature and landscapes, historic cities and archaeological sites, traditional lifestyles and intangible heritage this approach promoting a systematic knowledge, classification and integrated enhancement aims to:
- ensure better knowledge, appreciation and enhancement interventions for less valorised tourist areas;
- tackle problems of conservation of traditional communities or small historic towns dispersed in the countryside and threatened by fast growing urbanisation or decay;
- deal with landscape conservation issues, identifying new economically viable solutions;
- identify alternative itineraries that allow for the enhancement of minor or dispersed heritage sites, while mitigating tourist pressure in famous historic sites.
- ensure different adaptable planning solutions at an appropriate territorial scale to different kinds of dramatic events. (This approach may introduce also suitable indexes of resilience resulting out from the study of historic places adaptive capacities).
The “integrated valorisation” approach has been used by the ICVBC-Rome in the last years in different projects regarding archaeological areas in relation to their larger regional context in order to promote and attract greater tourist flows, such as the Etruscan site of Sovana, or the Museum of Sperlonga and Tiberius villa, and the enhancement of water-cultural artefacts, as in the case of the Water Shapes European project.
