3.1The State of the Art: A Growing Interest in the Last 20 Years

Terraced landscapes in Italy were, with few exceptions, long neglected by twentieth-century academic studies (Scaramellini 2010). However, this trend saw the first signs of reversal between 1980 and 1990, likely due to increasing terrace abandonment and consequent slope instability (Terranova 1989; see Tarolli et al. 2014, Bonardi and Varotto 2016).

Today, the growing awareness of terraced landscapes’ value goes hand-in-hand with their degradation and disappearance, which has, in turn, given rise to scientific and institutional initiatives to counter this decay. Over the past few decades, scientific surveys focusing on terraced landscapes have increased due to various European cooperative projects, such as the pioneering “Terrasses” program in France (1982–1989), the Swiss recovery program “Proterra” (1996), and the SUDOE cooperation project “PATTER—Heritage of terraces in the western Mediterranean” (1999–2001). These projects were followed by the Mallorca Council’s European project “TERRISC—Récupération des champs de terrasses prévention et des risques naturels” (2004–2006) and finally by the Interreg IIIB Alpine Space Project “ALPTER—Terraced landscapes of the Alps” (2005–2008) (www.alpter.net).

Society has also contributed to raising awareness about Europe’s terraced landscapes through various movements, associations, and local and international initiatives. Among the first were the “Dry Stone Walling Association (DSWA)”, born in Great Britain in 1968, the “Société scientifique internationale pour l’étude pluridisciplinaire de la Pierre Sèche (SPS),” founded in France in 1997, and the “Center for research and studies for the development of viticulture in the mountains (CERVIM)”, founded in Aosta in 1987. The International Alliance of Terraced Landscapes was founded in 2010, following the first World Conference on Terraced Landscapes in Honghe (China), and an Italian branch was added in 2011. Both national and international organizations have been supplemented by local initiatives, such as those of museums and eco-museums (e.g., in Italy, the Ecomuseum of the Terraces of Cortemilia in 1995 or the Ethnographic Museum of Brenta Valley in 2004), and, more recently, dry-stone wall handicraft courses and schools, as in the Province of Trento (2016).

After the first inscription of a terraced landscape on UNESCO’s World Heritage List (Ifugao in the Philippines, 1995: see Guimbatan and Baguilat 2006), several European vineyard terraces were also recognized. Among these were two Italian terraced landscapes, both inscribed in 1997: Cinque Terre (with a National Park later instituted in 1999) and the Amalfi Coast. By the end of 2013, 17 European agrarian landscapes were included on the list, with 12 of them related to vineyards and five specifically related to terraces. Another five candidates were also added to UNESCO’s Tentative List (Bonardi 2011).

A number of contemporary European official documents stimulated giving right value to the rural landscapes of the Alps and beyond—the Alpine Convention

(1991) and its Mountain Farming Protocol, the European Landscape Convention (2000), the recent National Register of Historic Rural Landscapes, promoted by the Italian Ministry of Agricultural Food and Forestry Policies (2012), and the measures of the Common Agricultural Policy specifically oriented for restoring and enhancing cultural landscapes (Asins Velis and Romero González 2015).

Despite growing attention and initiatives, knowledge of the extent, distribution, and conservation of Italian terraced landscapes still appears fragmented and incomplete. Some studies are detailed but are also limited to areas considered most significant—those recognized by UNESCO (Cinque Terre and the Amalfi Coast) or other important terraced areas, such as Valtellina in Lombardy, Brenta Valley in Veneto, Cembra and Terragnolo Valleys in Trentino, or Costa Viola in Calabria (see for example Brancucci et al. 2000; Italia Nostra 2004; Di Fazio et al. 2005; Bonardi 2008; Brandolini et al. 2008; Sarzo 2009; Gravagnuolo 2016). Regional censuses and mapping have, so far, been carried out in only five regions: Liguria, Tuscany, Sicily, Trentino, and Veneto (see Varotto 2008; Barbera et al. 2010; Agnoletti et al. 2015; Alberti and Lodatti 2016). Such studies have adopted different mapping methodologies, from aerial and satellite photos to field surveys, or, in the best cases, micro-relief analysis obtained from LIDAR data (e.g., in Trentino, which probably represents the most detailed survey of terraced systems at the national level: see Osservatorio del Paesaggio Trentino 2017). These local and regional studies have not yet been matched at the national level. A detailed map of national terraced heritage is still lacking, despite the fact that recent hydrogeological diseases, caused by climate change, have repeatedly highlighted the need for monitoring and safeguarding these crop systems. Bonardi (2008, 2010, 2016) carried out an initial estimate of the extent and distribution of Italian terraces, distinguishing between great or “regional” terraced areas for commercial production (such as Valtellina), intermediate or “sovralocal” systems (such as Cembra or Brenta Valleys), and “local” terraced areas built for subsistence agriculture (Bonardi 2010). Even without exact quantification as to the extent of terraced landscapes in the Alps and in Italy (Bonardi suggests more than 200,000 ha: see Bonardi and Varotto 2016), several measurement and classification methods have been proposed and tested in sample areas based on the extent and intensity of terracing found there (Scaramellini 2005; Varotto and Ferrarese 2008; Ferrarese et al. in this book).

3.2An Initial Survey on Extent, Distribution, and Land Use: The MAPTER Project

The MAPTER project was launched in 2016 with the aim of giving order and coherence to a cognitive landscape made up of highly differentiated knowledge levels, in terms of both information quality and geographical coverage. The project unified researchers and universities for an initial national survey of terraced areas, leading up to the third Meeting of the International Terraced Landscapes Alliance (ITLA) on October 6–15, 2016. MAPTER collected and harmonized georeferenced

Fig. 3.1 Map of the national distribution of the main terraced areas. Source MAPTER project, 2016; elaboration: Francesco Ferrarese, Salvatore Eugenio Pappalardo, Mauro Varotto

least 170,000 km of dry-stone walls are still present in the peninsula. These walls are, on average, less than 2 m high. However, they can reach cyclopean heights of 8–10 m in areas such as the Amalfi Coast or the Brenta Valley, due to steep slopes, favorable lithological conditions and materials, and a high cultivation profitability to compensate construction investment.

Fig. 3.2 Map of the altimetric distribution of the main Italian terraced areas. Source MAPTER project, 2016; elaboration: Francesco Ferrarese, Salvatore Eugenio Pappalardo, Mauro Varotto

Analyzing municipal terracing, the data show another peculiar aspect of Italian terraces—their strong character of insularity, with high concentrations in islands’ municipalities. For example, in absolute values, Italy’s most terraced municipality is Pantelleria Island (5500 ha), followed by other Sicilian municipalities (Genoa, the first non-Sicilian municipality, is in fifth place). However, in percentage terms,

Fig. 3.3 Land use classification of the Italian terraced areas. Source MAPTER project—Corine land cover 2012; elaboration: Francesco Ferrarese, Mauro Varotto

estimated at around 6%. This is certainly rough data, calculated on a minimum cell area of 25 ha, which does not reflect the originally promiscuous nature of these plots. Still, it is useful at a small scale to capture the great variety of terrace use in Italy, where terracing has been wrongly associated in the contemporary image with the profitable and officially celebrated vineyard, which, in reality, concerns an extremely limited portion of terrace extent. This leads to some perplexity on whether such minimal land use, thanks to its economic profitability, can really affect the fortune and maintenance of such a vast terraced heritage.

An aspect of further interest is the remarkable development of terraced areas around the active or extinct volcanic cones of the Tyrrhenian coast (Etna, Somma and Vesuvius, Roccamonfina, and the Latium Volcanoes), particularly sought after for the peculiar soil minerality, used for orchards, chestnut groves, citrus groves, olive groves, and vineyards.

The data thus highlight the main threat Italian terraced landscapes face—namely abandonment and the advance of spontaneous reforestation. These are opposed, albeit less widespread, by the opposite trend toward urbanization and productive intensification, which transforms these complex landscapes into simplified, high-yield agrarian systems, often breaking down retaining walls or replacing them with gabions or concrete walls, compromising a valuable historical and cultural landscape. This is the “extremization” of habitats that characterized the Italian mountains during the second half of the twentieth century (Bätzing 2005).

3.3A Second Survey: Toward a “Third Way” Between Abandonment and Agribusiness

In the last decades, in Italy and in other European countries, there has been a tendency to come back to abandoned lands and to the mountains (Dematteis 2011; Varotto 2013; Corrado et al. 2014; Varotto 2015). We have also observed this in some terraced landscapes (Bonardi and Varotto 2016: 115), as the Manifesto “Terraced landscapes: choosing the future” at the back of this book underlines. These new paths aim to overcome the profound dichotomy that characterized the mountains of the twentieth century, the gap between development processes and protection claims; they attempt to reconcile environmental, historical, and economic values, overcoming and reducing the fractures and poor territorial outcomes of twentieth century specialization (Du Guerny and Hsu 2012). Modern technologies and materials (concrete, plastics) and heavy agricultural mechanization are caesuras with a past considered outdated, and they have led to the gap between useful and useless, separating functional spaces from wasteland (Gri and Pascolini 2005; Bätzing 2005).

“Every stone is good”, the dry-stone craftsmen say. Every stone, sooner or later, finds its place in building a wall, and there is no room for the “culture of waste.” The stones are, at the same time, “alive” for those who cultivate around them, for the animal and plant microcosms that inhabit the interstices, for those who gaze on them from the outside as tourists or visitors. They welcome modernity, not as opposition, but as an integration of the plots inherited from the past. They live in the present, without erasing the past and without blocking the future. In this effort to reunite different functions, sometimes precarious and not always with a happy ending, we should forge a new “pact” (Camanni 2002; Donadieu 2006) between the urban and the rural (Guiseppelli 2005, 2006; Luginbuhl 2007), between mountains and plains, between local microcosms and the macrocosm crossed by globalization challenges. In fact, for many trajectories, the fruition, proximity, and relationship between the outside world and the terracing, the slope, the valley, and, more generally, the Alpine and Apennine mountains, are not oppositional but are proposed as a new alliance promoting development to enhance the starting context.

Despite diverse declinations; historical and geographical areas; individual or collective initiatives; spontaneous or structured efforts; or social, agronomic, and leisure values, these paths are crossed by common denominators outlining a “third way” for terraced landscapes. This “third way” escapes today’s dominant tendencies: abandonment and degradation on the one hand, and the opposing intensifi- cation of production that stiffens, waterproofs, and trivializes the functional complexity of the dry-stone walls, of the crops, and of the people who work them.