The Resilience of the Valley of Temples Among Natural Calamities and Social Disaster

Abstract

Preservation of the cultural heritage, intended as common patrimony, is a cultural achievement that in territories like Sicily, which has often suffered the lack of legality, is the result of a difficult process of implementation. Cultural heritage is not ruined exclusively by natural calamities: damages caused by social and cultural disasters may at times be even more devastating. The archeological park of Agrigento, born in 1947 after a natural disaster (a landslide in 1944), hides a history of a half century of battles between the illegal land use and legislative measures to protect a cultural heritage recognized worldwide (registered in the WHL in 1997). After fifty years of attacks against the archaeological park, a slow process of collective re-appropriation of the Valley of Temples hhaass bbeegguunn ssiinnccee 22000000.. AA llaaww eessttaabblliisshheedd bbyy tthhee SSiicciilliiaann RReeggiioonn hhaass llaauunncchheedd this process; this law, unique in its genre, is finally producing long-awaited resul s. Herein, we describe battles lost and won, stakeholders took to the filed, failure and successes that, during the last decade, have transformed the Valley of Temples from a synonymous of illegality and unauthorized building into an example of excellent enhancement of the cultural heritage. In 2017, indeed, the archeological park has been awarded the Italian Award for the Landscape and then brought up by the Ministry for Cultural and Environmental Heritage as candidate to represent Italy for the European Council Landscape Award.