Land of Terraces: From the Landscape of Necessity to the Need of the Landscape

The construction of these extraordinary territorial structures, whose main purpose was the cultivation of the land and the production of food, involved both prodigious physical work and a remarkable task of design and construction exactly embedded in the slopes of the mountains. The passage of time, which acts like a gigantic eraser, and the loss of the original reason that led to them cause these terraced landscapes to fade. If it was human need – essentially related to food production – that created them, we should look for new reasons, new functions and new formulas to reactivate and conserve them.Beyond the obvious aesthetic and landscape perspective (emotion), terraced landscapes and agroecosystems and other historical productive structures generated by peasant communities can play a decisive role as both a productive and heritage resource, both at the service of a new peasant economy and at the service of the conservation of complex heritage facts.