3.3.1The New Value of the “Longue Durée”

The first element linking these trajectories is an awareness of terraces’ historical value. Far from making it appear an unused heritage of the past, the landscape’s longue durée represents added value in an era of rapid change—a stability that balances mobility with the frenzy of everyday life. Longue durée can also play a role in symbolic marketing because returning to terraces, for many, means reconnecting themselves to history and geology, through lithological autochthony or the old cultivars adapted to the environment with time (see also Marson, in this book). In some of the experiences identified in the Livingstones Project (Varotto 2016), promoters of return are associations that, following the example of the pioneering Société Pierre Sèche established in France in 1997, recognize multiple values in the art of working with stone, or ecomuseums working to protect memory from the historical–ethnographic perspective.

Identity plays a part in reestablishing a link with the “land of the fathers.” Many cases are of young people who return to forgotten farms inherited from their parents. However, this link does not exclusively mean possession but can instead delineate belonging earned through caring for the land. This search for identity does not translate into simple conservation. It is the product of an intergenerational dialogue. The vertical extension of temporality is associated with the horizontal, geographical extension of multiscalarity. This continuity exists thanks to an in–out dialectic, between insider and outsider, as in the case of Brenta Valley’s small terraces (Varotto 2006, 2013; Lodatti 2013; Varotto and Lodatti 2014). It is, therefore, an identity combining roots and routes, re-fertilizing the mountains with contributions from outside the local reality, without imposing exogenous models of development.

3.3.2Quality Turn: Local, Artisanal, Different

Quality is a nuanced and ambiguous term (Jackson 2013). It is cloaked in multiple values: the production reflecting characteristics of a place, the craftsmanship of work, the small production size and its sustainability, far beyond the simple taste sought and praised by Masterchef TV programs.

Quality means passion for the earth and for the stone, which translates into the manual skills of some processes—favoring adaptive techniques (see Murtas 2013, 2015) against the standardized intervention of an industrial matrix. It can be said that a “terroir” is built here starting from its minimum cell: the terraced field and the man who works there. This assumes a declination beginning with the biodiversity of a few square meters of cultivation and extending to the slopes. The slopes, in turn, compose a mosaic extending to the entire valley, often fighting against increasingly standardized and bureaucratized rules of production.

Quality is not necessarily synonymous with a pauperistic perspective or lack of profit. It means a market for niche products recognized all over the world, as is the

case with the fine wines of Ischia. Defending quality means abandoning or overshadowing profit, high yield, interest, and immediate gain. Here, the concept of economy is linked with its original etymology of managing a house that is simultaneously environment, place, and landscape. Quality means knowing how to wait, dilating the return time of an investment. For this reason, in the era of high yields per hectare and maximum efficiency, the defense of quality seems a luxury possible only in situations of part-time or hobby farmers with access to multiple incomes. Far from being a point of weakness, this part-time farming is a strength if recognized and oriented to terrace maintenance toward functional plurality.

3.3.3“Leaving Room for Others”: The Ecological and Social Sustainability

Many returns to terraces avoid agronomic investment situations oriented to maximum yield, to the exploitation of every available space regardless of the impact on biodiversity, on the ecological and social balance, and on the landscape ecosystems (Plieninger et al. 2006; Haubenhofer et al. 2010a, b).

The terraced landscape, left at the margins by a certain model of agricultural development, becomes an opportunity to express alternative routes, to enhance old crops and methods of organic cultivation (Nossiter 2004). In this way, organic wine is opposed to Amarone’s “desert of vineyards,” and ancient varieties of tomatoes are recovered on the Amalfi Coast. The terraced landscape’s biodiversity exists on at least three levels: the diversity of the species cultivated in the field; the “third landscape” represented by interstices and margins near the walls, in which rich microflora and microfauna flourish (Sarzo 2009); and the remote, abandoned spaces left to natural evolution because they are difficult to recover and cultivate. Cultivating in nature and not against nature is the median way these new farmers (Van der Ploeg 2009) pursue, debunking the “uncontaminated” concept—a spy of a modernist approach to nature—which fraudulently means man only “impacts” nature negatively.

When cultivated in rather than against, nature is not only preserved, but is even encouraged by the creation of specific anthropogenic ecologies: the Mediterranean habitats of the “masiere” or “parracine” (local dry-stone wall names) with incredible niches of microbotanical richness; the dry-stone wall flora seen as an ethnobotanical heritage to be used medicinally (Sarzo 2004); and, together with averting slope failure, preventing hydraulic risks by choosing the philosophy of protective care over resolving emergencies.

Looking closely at terrace sustainability, the answer is here—reconciling human and environmental needs by overcoming Man-Nature Manichaeism. Terracing is opposed to industrial modernity, but not to “modernity” tout court, which is always redefined with respect to terracing’s past. In this sense, environmental sustainability does not mean going back. It can marry forms of high technological innovation,

with low-impact research and production, with phytodepuration plants and renewable energy production, while reusing traditional housing and rural landscapes.

3.3.4Sociability to Tame Verticality

Another common feature of return trajectories is rediscovering the economysharing and cooperation that has historically characterized the impervious conditions of life and work in the mountains. It is true that the terraced areas are, in general, privately owned, but this legal characteristic is grafted into the sociability of the complex “proximity networks” that have guaranteed wise system maintenance (Acovitsioti Hameau 2008).

In the experiences collected in the Livingstones Project (Varotto 2016), at least three levels of shared management can be distinguished. The first sharing dimension is at the family scale, played out on an intergenerational level, which proposes updating the traditional family farming model (Crowley 2013; Wymann von Dach et al. 2014; Varotto and Lodatti 2014). The second level is determined by the presence of broader, associative structures, which encourage participatory and inclusive recovery forms, such as the Committee for the Adoption of Abandoned Land in Valstagna or the project for social inclusion managed by the social cooperatives of Sondrio (Bonardi and Varotto 2016). In the most fortunate and structured outcomes, which are generally not so frequent, these association networks are also supported by the public administration.

From these projects—be they familiar, associative, or supported by public bodies

—often emerges a “third level” of sharing with a wider user audience, which is played out, not only through web visibility, but also in concrete initiative promotion to raise awareness and share the landscape as a common good. There are no barbed wires, video surveillance systems, or threatening signs, even if the properties are private. Behind this lies an idea of hospitality oriented in two directions, toward the earth and toward humanity (Bonesio 2003). It seems that there cannot be one without the other, because the idea of common good and collective pleasure extends to embrace the field, humankind, and the planet together (Francesco 2015). Once again, this perspective marks its distance from solitary trajectories, which are more the result of desperate and losing attempts, as evidenced by the contrast between the farmers of Giuseppe Taffarel’s “Fazzoletti di terra” and the new forms of adoption in the documentary “Small land” (Piccola terra: see Trentini and Romano 2012; Varotto and Rossetto 2016). The sharing of fatigue, a newfound sociality, and a sense of community that breaks away from the shortness of individual self-interest are aspects that meet the idea of landscape as a common good expressed by the European Landscape Convention and by the International Terraced Landscapes Alliance—a source of identity and well-being for all its inhabitants (see Peters and Junchao 2012; Tillmann and Bueno de Mesquita 2015; Alberti et al. 2018).

3.3.5Landscape as a Theater: Aesthetic and Educational Values

In many cases, the places of return are chosen also for their aesthetic value—a harmoniousness of forms emanating from the dialogue between stones and landscape, from the adaptability and sweetness of the wall’s lines supporting the relief, from the mastery and perfection that comes from processing boulders handed down by generations of craftsmen and farmers.

The terraced areas are, by nature, panoramic. They are balconies on the surrounding world, natural theaters, and, as such, they invite people to reflection and contemplation, to be, at the same time, “actors” and “spectators” in the landscape (Turri 2006). This requirement of beauty naturally transforms these places into educational workshops en plein air, an opportunity for experiences such as educational gardens and food courses—each one inviting people to re-appropriate knowledge and skills to guide behavior models toward local development.

This movement of experiences opens terraced spaces to the world and allows them to return to what they have always been—spaces born out of necessity and from the dynamics that postponed local microcosms, born for demographic or commercial reasons in past centuries, and continuing for the existential motivations of identity, quality, and sustainability today.

Most of the Italian terraces have been abandoned because society and the economy have turned their backs on them, thus condemning them to collapse. It is not an ineluctable destiny, if we create conditions so the terraces can exercise a plural function today: productive, environmental, economic, and social. The strength of these return trajectories, together with their virtuosity, is not given by this or that element taken singularly, nor by the conservation of the terrain’s morphology and the walls themselves. The vision of the future these practices promise comes from being able to respond to many needs together. What, on the contrary, determines its fragility is the lack of political and economic guidelines capable of rewarding (not necessarily supporting) a multi-functional and multi-level perspective. The recognition of a historical rural landscape is not enough. The UNESCO World Heritage List, the European incentives, and policies for ecosystem services are not enough, nor is the recognition of a PDO or PGI specification, nor even restrictions for protected natural areas or museums (see Puleo 2012). These are beneficial, but they must be less specialized and more open to an overview and a shared project.

In this sense, the terraced landscapes that come back to life reflect the difficulties of our time—an era of specialization and efficiency incapable of building a unitary vision that holds the demanding judgment of conscious citizens and the future. But these terraces are also the seeds of a new vision of agriculture, of life, and of the world struggling to be something that is different and apparently, but not actually, impossible.