La foce del Neretva: Identità storico architettonica di una terra di confine tra oriente e occidente

The area of study of this piece of writing is the one that delimits the low plain of Neretva. This area affects the Croatian region crossing Metković and the settlement of Opuzen (that rules the well-watered plain of the Neretva delta) that flows into the Adriatic sea near Ploče, whose port controls a wide internal canyon of the Adriatic basin, where the islands of Hvar (Lesina) and Korcula and the peninsula of Peljesac overlook. The writing talks about the relation between a territory and a specific identity and shape of the anthropic space. Here, the rural space, intended as a place of production – of agriculture as sheep farming - and as urban space - composed of villages and scattered settlements – is the direct manifestation of the deep interaction of the architectural space with the environmental structure, with the conditions of use of the territory and the living rules of the inhabitants. All this talks about a specific way of interpreting the places (with their raw materials and geographical features), but also about a particular technical knowledge, grown through a complex historical and cultural evolution. This condition becomes particularly complex and rich of places like these that, for their geographical position and environmental characterization, can be considered all along, real “middle earth”. Places in which different cultures and histories meet; where the boundaries among ethnic groups, civilizations, different identities overlap and mix, generating an environmental and cultural cohesion extremely variegated and, anyway, capable of reaching an extraordinary balance. Thus, the territory of the low plain of Neretva seems, in the first place, having forgot the deep contribution given to the building of this territory by the Roman civilization. The attention of the Roman civilization to the building of the urban and country landscape left in these places a witness that in the course of centuries, identified with the deepest meaning of these places and that the current logics of the development can not see and risk to erase definitively. The aim of this study is, thus, to demonstrate how the concept of sustainability of architecture is not in the research of architectural shapes and urban, economic and cultural solutions, internationally recognizable but, on the contrary, in the discovery of those historical and cultural identities that better optimize the material, social and economic resources of a territory and that the history of these places continues to communicate with its shapes and traditions.