Landscape as architecture. Identity and conservation of Crapolla cultural site-Paesaggio come architettura. Identità e conservazione del sito culturale di Crapolla

Starting from the urgent problems and complex challenges for the conservation of stratified landscapes, places of the synthesis between human activity and nature, the volume presents the results of a research project that involved since 2008 the cultural site of Crapolla, located on the southern slope of the Sorrento-Amalfi Peninsula and within the Punta Campanella Marine Protected Area.
Paradigm of landscapes where a thousand year old history has settled and where the emotional values emerge with strength, because of the presence of spring waters and of hills jutting into the sea, of the etymological allusion to ancient myths and gods, the site of Crapolla is full of a dense sense of the sacred. With it, the deep cracks of the rocks and the dizzying height of the latter assure a romantic aura to the whole. The deep "gorge" includes impressive buildings referable to ancient usages of the place, a port for sailors, site for the storage of food and for the supply of fresh water. The forms of architecture of the monazeni embedded into the rocks, the ruins of a Medieval abbey, the imposing mass of a sixteenth-century tower witness all the high strategic significance that the cove has assumed in the historical landscape of the Peninsula over the centuries.
In the symbiosis between sublime nature and architecture, the landscape of Crapolla is, at the same time, very "fragile" and at risk of oblivion. The research here published, together with the numerous studies and experiences carried out in Italian and European contexts, face with rigor of analysis and active approach many issues related to the understanding of the intangible values ? i.e. anthropological, literary and social ones ? and of the physical and construction characteristics of the artifacts and the landscape.
This is in order to highlight, through an integrated methodology of research, a coherent approach from the small to the large scale for a programmed preservation of the cultural landscape so as to prevent, through restoration and with the involvement of the local communities, the irreversible loss of precious vestiges of the past.