The Resilience of the Valley of Temples among natural calamities and social disasters

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 illegal land use and legislative measures to protect a cultural heritage recognized worldwide. After fifty years of attacks against the archaeological park, a slow process of collective re-appropriation of the cultural heritage has begun since 2000: the Regional Law 20/2000 has launched this process with the establishment of the Archaeological and Landscape Park of the Valley of the Temples, producing long-awaited results. The park has an extension of 1,400 hectares and was established to protect and increase the value of the archaeological findings and the landscape heritage, involving public and private partners and promoting the participation of the local population [1]. Herein, we describe battles lost and won, stakeholders took to the filed, failures and successes that 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.