The Recovery of the Landscape: the Relationship between Settlement and Rural Landscape in the Territory of Ugento (Southern Italy)

Assay is part of the research on the relationship between city and cultural landscape carried out in several years within a European programme (INTERREG III A Programme - WET SYS B) and currently under way enhancement project of Ugento’s regional park and coastal urban area. We are in Puglia, in the last ramification of the Ionic coast. In the past the coast of Ugento appeared to visitors as a wild place dominated by the medieval castle of Ugento’s settlement.The town, an old Messapic centre called “Uzentum”, rises on a small hill that slopes towards the sea. Today, along the coast you can find centres that starting from the 1960s have suffered the aggression of an unregulated tourism that threatens to destroy the entire surrounding landscape. This research aims at demonstrating how, behind the crisis of an urban historical area and its system of reference, there is a hidden alteration of the primary relationships between the settlements and the surrounding landscape.