Designing interventions, new construction or modification of the existing one, in a prestigious area such as a UNESCO site classified as a “living evolutionary cultural landscape” requires dealing with many restrictions, generated by particularly strict legislation, aimed at preventing the uniqueness of the site. But compliance with the legislation in force does not always guarantee that the “rules” (type of buildings, morphology and technology of the terraces) with which the territory has been transformed over the centuries are maintained, while keeping the system in balance.

To reduce this risk, the Management Plan has provided for the production of a “Catalogue of appropriate interventions”, which provides designers with indications and examples to satisfy the most frequent land use requirements by adopting the historical transformation rules, suitably revisited.

The catalog provides precise rules both for agricultural use (restoring cultivation of abandoned terraces, whose unmaintained structures have deteriorated; restoration of the “fishponds”) and for residential use (philological restorations, vault repair techniques, extensions that incorporate the historical solutions).

The Catalog is also appropriate because the legislation in force often generates the “corruption” of the historical rules. The retaining walls of the terraces, for example, are made with the “dry” technique; their restoration requires compliance with anti-seismic regulations, which inevitably lead to the replacement of the stones with reinforced concrete, perhaps “masked” with stones of reduced thickness. The catalog will make it possible to define a testing protocol for the “macere”, which can be recovered with the original techniques and with a higher level of safety.

Read: The rules of self-regulation