Infrastrutture territoriali: tutela e valorizzazione delle antiche vie armentizie

Mediterranean rural landscape is characterized by a stringent and specific relationship between settlement structures, territorial infrastructures and forms of land use. In the architecture of agrarian landscape, shaped by transformations of the earth for productive purposes, the archaeal demanio, linked to the ancient phenomenon of transhumance, represents a real territorial infrastructure that, lying on the shape of the ground, crosses not only the south of Italy, but also the whole Mediterranean area. Transhumance routes design a frame potentially capable of connecting different places but united by a related history: they represent, undoubtedly, an instrument of transmission of a culture and an unique pastoral civilization; but above all, they express a human and environmental dimension, a collective response of a society culturally linked to its territory, from an environmental point of view, but also climatic, orographic, landscape. The present contribution has as its object of investigation the elaboration of a representative model of Apulian landscape of ancient arterial ways: the long grassy streets, called "tratturi", which connected Abruzzo with the flat Puglia. The defined model, expression of a consolidated method, is based on an idea of the territory as "palimpsest", as a stratification of elements linked to its nature, its use and its crossing. These elements have two distinct complementary natures: they are defined either as physical facts, endowed with a tangible substance, or as intangible facts, belonging to the sphere of history and the memory of places. These facts, in different ways, determine the identity of a territory.