The “Barber Gap” Ancient Mule Trail between Camogli and San Rocco

The “Barber Gap” Ancient Mule Trail between Camogli and San Rocco Landscape Restoration Project of the River Gentile Valley

Andrea Scotti ndrscotti@yahoo.com & collettivomilarepa@gmail.com Salita S. Prospero 1- 16032 Camogli (GE) - Italy

Abstract This paper aims to present a project concerning the restoration of an ancient trail – established at the beginning of the XVIII century – that was the main connection between the heights of the Mount Portofino villages, the harbour of Camogli and its coastline. This trail is a two kilometres long dry-stone construction sited in the north-west of Italy in the region of Liguria and in the municipality of Camogli.

Nowadays this trail is inaccessible because of landslides and fallen dry-stone walls. By collecting and classifying all known documents/maps concerning the development of this vital trail, this paper will present a plan of renewal based on dry-stone construction methodology and will asses the possible economic, tourism and cultural impact of a new use of the valley. This work is divided in four sections. Section (a) presents the historical and geographic documentation that testifies the landscape policy concerning all walk-ways/trails of the municipality of Camogli and its heights. This to explain how far back the attempt to take care of the drystone heritage in this area dates, and how little has been achieved. This documentation is very important th because, in the different attempts that have been carried out since the middle of the 19 century, it also bears testimony of the figures concerning the expenditure that the municipality would have to face. These figures can be a base on which we can make a projection of the cost of such enterprise today. Secondly, the existence of these primary sources reveals the importance that this trail had up to the end of the 1960s after which the abandonment of the land and its cultivation activities brought to a complete negligence of both the terraces, the woods and the trails. Section (b) presents the objectives of the project that are built around a main goal, i.e. the establishment of a permanent Public Dry-Stone School to produce a new generation of masons with environment knowledge in the perspective of a long-term policy of green circular economy and landscape care. The idea is to transform a study case into a practice that impacts the real life of the people living here and make tourists aware of the cultural role of the landscape. This practice will show how it can be possible, together with the local institutions, to enforce a new economic model of landscape exploitation that will consider the revitalization with modern methods of local agriculture (primarily olive trees, chestnuts and wood) to furnish the local market. Moreover, the aim is also to develop a new multidisciplinary workforce to handle the hydro-geologic instability of the area. Section (c) will explain the methodological choices, and the digital technology to document and communicate the progress of the work. This section will show how the model adapted can be re-used in other areas of the national territory or even abroad where terraced landscape has been abandoned. Section (d) will present the cooperation network needed to carry out the project and how these kind of enterprises require a multi-disciplinary approach to develop a practical and theoretical expertise. Finally, this section will present the short-term expected results and a long-term policy for the management of the Public Dry-Stone School and its landscape caring activity.

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A. Introduction: historical notes, cartography and photo survey The mule trail we are thinking to restore is located on the heights of the municipality of Camogli, north-west Italy, on the eastern coast of the city of Genoa. To find the documentation that could give us traces of its history, known for some centuries as a true municipality street under the name “Road of Castagneto/Pissorella” and nowadays as “Passo do Barbè”, has not been an easy task. First of all because all sources are scattered into local journals and local history publications that date back to the 19th and 20th centuries, and secondly because these sources do not consider this trail out of the context of the 109 classified ones that cross the heights of Camogli connecting the scattered blocks of the town with the marina or give access to the neighbouring municipalities. Nonetheless, we fortunately where able to identify it, among the others, using old maps drawn between 18431 and 1981 located in the Historical Archive of the Municipality of Camogli (from now on ASCC i.e. Archivio Storico del Comune di Camogli). Here by you can see the map, dated 1843, where we can find (the red is ours) the trail drawn with double line precisely as all main connecting roads of the municipality2.

st

Fig. 1 - Detail of the 1 Map of all pedestrian trails in Camogli - 1843 1

We will discuss why this date is important ahead in this paper.

ASCC, Folder, 345, item n.7, 1843; see also: C. Campodonico, Il borgo di Camogli nei decenni centrali dell’Ottocento attraverso la classificazione delle strade, in: Microstorie, 2016, 173-198; and C. Campodonico, Per la storia urbanistica e architettonica di Camogli nel XIX secolo, in: Microstorie 2019, 55-82.

2

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Even though the studies on the roads and trails of the municipality of Camogli are pretty scarce3, altogether from these sources emerges that, since the 17th and 18th centuries, the quoted mule trail was the main connection to the city and its marina on which all agricultural and, all trough the 19th century, also textile goods produced in the surrounding villages of Ruta, Bana, San Rocco, Mortola and Galletti where brought to town.

In order to understand the importance of the pedestrian trails of Camogli we have to shortly explain the historical context in which the census of these connecting roads took place. Till 1861, date of the unification of Italy as a state, the region Liguria was part of the kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia and as such affected by its existing laws. In 1838 the king Carlo Alberto of Savoy emanates a new law concerning the maintenance and care of public roads and private ones with public utility of each municipality of the kingdom 4.

This law obliged the administrations of all towns and cities to deliver a full census of their own roads and trails in order to be able to estimate a cost for the central administration finalized to their renewal or maintenance. The answer to this request was discussed in the city council of Camogli for five years and finally the census and budget were approved in 1843. The first relatively modern map that we have found in the ASCC, of the area we would like to restore, is therefore dated 1843. Its attached documentation, sent to the central administration, describes the type of street, its maintenance condition and the material with which these roads where constructed, but very little can be found concerning the fact if the entire project was finally supported or not.

The 90% of all roads at that time where built with dry-stone technology and many of them required maintenance.

The census was recompiled six times till 1921 and again in 1980-81. The conditions of many trails of the heights of Camogli, despite all these investigations and investments, with the mass abandonment of the land in the mid of the 20th century, are nowadays completely neglected. We can show hereunder the two maps of the 6th census carried out in 19215.

3

On the history of roads and trails of Camogli there is a cartographic document in the National Archive of Genoa (A.S.G), namely: Anonymous, Raccolta cartografica, A.S.G., Series Senato, Litterarum, Folder 213, File 4, 1610, printed also in: M. Castrogiovanni, P. Ansaldo, Camogli acquarelli, Rapallo, 1965, that shows the map of all public roads of Camogli of that period. See also: M. Vinzoni, Pianta delle due Riviere della Serenissima Republica di Genova divise ne’ Commissari di Sanità, 1758, manuscript n. GEN01-001100371, Public Library Berio, Genoa, Italy; of which can be found a printed version in: M.Quaini (ed.), M. Vinzoni, ibidem, Genova, 1983. An interesting comment concerning the area we are considering for this project can be found in a short note by: M. Castrogiovanni, Pianta e loco di Camogli, in: Gioventù Olivetana, n.

3-4, 1966, 4, where our trail has also an other name, driven from the locality it crosses, Via di Lasagna. For the pedestrian streets and trails names of Camogli, see also the catalogue of its vernacular names by: W. Fochesato, Per crêuze e carroggi, 1985, 107-124.

4 We are using here the short form of the law title: Regie Patenti per le quali S. M. determina il modo con che si dovrà regolare il servizio delle Comandate per le Strade Comunali [...], in: D. rd th Pane (ed.), Gazzetta piemontese, n. 35, 3 March and 13 April, 1838, which is a collection of all the royal decrees of that year.

5 See: ASCC, Folder 345.

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th

Fig. 2 – 6 Census of the walk roads of Camogli - Version One

th

Fig. 3 – 6 Census of the walk roads of Camogli - Version Two

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In order to fully understand what has been the effort to map the pedestrian municipal roads and trails in Camogli we can show the most recent and last survey that, as said above, was carried out between 1980 and 19816. This map numbers each trail and has an attached catalogue from which we where able to derive their current names. They are divided in three categories: primary (red), secondary (green/black), tertiary yellow. The trails we have pointed out in this map show both the full path of the street we are considering to restore, and that in 1981, what once was the main municipality road, is here classified as a minor one. This shows how the memory of its function has been along time brushed away and its maintenance forgotten.

n.39 (green) connecting Via Ansaldo & Via Livello

n.7 (red) & n.33 (green) Via Livello

n.16 (yellow) Municipal road “Delle Chiappe�

n.19 (yellow) Old Municipal San Rocco road

Fig. 4 – Detail of the pedestrian streets from 1980-81 census.

6

ASCC, Folder 50 , Rifacimento delle strade pedonali , Delibera Comunale con presidente il sindaco Mario Bellagamba, item. 7, 1980-81.

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This map was furnished with a detailed catalogue where to a given number was assigned the name of the trail, its length, status, construction material, and maintenance or renewal costs. We have used such catalogue to identify the Barber Gap. All yellow paths would need some serious care, nonetheless, in the short term the emergency that our project is taking into consideration involves the landslides and wall falls only of the numbers (16) and (19). If we take into consideration the notes of the officer who wrote this catalogue and we look at the costs he foresees for the maintenance of this trail, and considering a proportion between what was the Italian Lira at that time and the Euro today, it becomes pretty clear that renewing this trail would be far cheaper then the expenditure required if the whole slope would slide into the river. We report here the translation of the catalogue text 7 that describes the two trails: a) “n. 16 Municipal road named ‘Delle Chiappe’ – 270 linear meters – status: very bad – cost: L. 10.690.620”. b) “n. 19 Municipal Old Road of S. Rocco – 750 linear meters – status: very bad – cost: L. 29.655.097”.

If we consider also the trails numbered (39, 7, 33) that are near to the first inhabited area of Pissorella the whole track is of 1100 linear meters long and the total renewal cost, foreseen from the 1981 census, is of L. 40.345.717. These figures could be of some help to define the investment required to carry out this work today.

The technical report that the officer entitled to carry out the survey wrote starts as follows: “At the moment the state of the art [of the pedestrian streets] looks significantly deteriorated due to many years of inefficient renewal works that failed to properly fit into the trait of this historical landscape. Moreover, these works could, on the long run, jeopardize the possibility to manage a probable physical decline of all pedestrian roads” 8.

The document goes on presenting other analytical and juridical problems concerning the land ownership. The trail is public and is a property of the municipality, but it crosses private land that is divided in many different blocks. In order to carryout the maintenance and renewal of the trail we will have to take care also of the woods that, with the abandonment, grew in such a wild way destroying, specially on its mountain side, not only the dry-stone walls sustaining 7

ASCC, Folder 50 , Rifacimento delle strade pedonali, Delibera Comunale con presidente il sindaco Mario Bellagamba, item. 7, 1980-81.

8 ASCC, Folder 50, item. 1, p.1. The original text of Giovanni Battista Giudice, councilor for public works at the municipality of Camogli in 1981, is: “[...] La situazione si presenta oggi notevolmente degradata sotto più di un profilo, a causa di una miriade di interventi, che risale negli anni, che non hanno ottenuto il risultato di inserire pienamente questa ampia zona nella realtà d’oggi, e rischiamo d’altra parte di snaturare le caratteristiche paesistiche e ambientali, ponendo conteporaneamente in essere difficoltà di gestione tali da rendere in prospettiva probabile un deterioramento anche fisico delle vie comunicazione pedonali.”

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it but also the dry-stone pavement of the trail and some of the downhill walls sustaining the pavement. Therefore, to deal with these woods, an environment and forest management plan should be assessed involving the owners of these properties. Seeing that the municipality of Camogli, maybe together with other public institutions, will be leader/s of the project we have thought would be of some help to classify each property unit, both on the downhill and uphill side, of the entire trail using the most recent cadastral map available.

Fig. 5 – Camogli’s cadastral map 2018: Old road of S. Rocco

If you follow the red line you will notice that along the trail there is – and altogether in all the valley – an extreme fragmentation of the properties. The phenomena of land property fragmentation together with its abandonment has been deeply studied 9 and in Italy many juridical attempts, during the last two 9

See: M. Quaini, Per la storia del paesaggio agrario in Liguria , Savona, 1973, and M. Quaini, Villaggi abbandonati e storia dell'insediamento in Liguria, in: Atti del colloquio internazionale di archeologia medievale. Palermo-Erice, 20-22 Settembre 1974, Palermo 1976. These two works where one of first attempts to define a systematic multidisciplinary approach to geographic -

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centuries, have been made to manage the entanglements of these administrative and environmental plagues. To quote one out of thousand, the royal decree of the 13th February 1933 Concerning the General Problem of Land Remediation, Chapter 4, Recomposition of fragmented properties 10, was a law – still existing today but never enforced - that imposed to the owners of land and woods the care of the landscape, meaning that these properties should have a certain standard of safety or the property would be confiscated and managed by the state. Moreover, this law supported the merging of small properties into collective ones in order to give them the chance to survive, with some significant financial support from the state, and, in this way, grant them a certain level of productivity.

But this law did not consider an other very old one concerning property inheritance existing from 1789 in Liguria, that became part of the Napoleonic code after 180911, that states that each member of a family has a right to a part of the inheritance proportioned to the number of individuals that can be legally eligible to claim it. This code is still in force today in Italy12. In other words, along the inheritance line the land property splits at every new generation producing its atomization13.

Therefore, having in advance the full list of the single properties, we will give to the municipality of Camogli the possibility to deal with these administrative problems that include also the task to deal with the case that some owners may have left so many years ago to be unreachable today.

Summary of the cadastral units of the trail Trail/road name

Condition

Position

Unit num.

Old road of S. Rocco

wall fall & landslide

uphill

36

historical studies of the landscape and its juridical, anthropological and environmental background concerning the region Liguria.

10 Gazzetta Ufficiale, n.79, 4 April 1933. This law was integrating the forests and landscape one, namely the Regio Decreto 30 December 1923 Sul Riordinamento delle Foreste, n. 3267 that found its application only three years later with the Regio Decreto 16 May 1926, n. 1126.

Finally in 2016 all these laws where unified in what today is called the TUFF (Testo Unico delle Filere Forestali e delle Foreste – Unified Text for Forest Production and Management), a uniformed text integrated with EU guidelines to manage both the forests and their productivity and their owners role. Furthermore, this law regulates the state role within the whole management of possible hydro-geologic risks of these forested lands. Therefore the municipality of Camogli, in the case that could not find the owners of each block of land, would intervene above the property law.

11 See: Consiglio dei Sessanta, Raccolta delle leggi ed atti del corpo Legislativo della Republica Ligure, vol. 1, Genoa, 1789, 201-204, that anticipates the Napoleonic code of 1804 on inheritance and in which formal structure was included in 1809.

12 See: Codice di procedura Civile, Lib. II – Delle Successioni, 2009/2019.

13 A. Omizzolo, Impatti della frammentazione fondiaria nelle aree montane italiane e indirizzi di riqualificazione - Impacts of Land Property Fragmentation in Italian Mountain Areas and Requalification Guidelines, PhD, University of Urbino, Italy, 2015. This work explains in a very detailed manner the fragmentation problem and all the economical and social entanglements that such land property atomization implies. This problem , is not restricted only to the region Liguria, but involves all the alps chain from the maritime West (Liguria) to higher East ones, and part of the Central Italy Apennines.

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Old road of S. Rocco

wall fall & landslide

downhill

600

Old road of S. Rocco

wall fall & landslide

uphill

59

Old road of S. Rocco

wall fall & landslide

downhill

58

Old road of S. Rocco

wall fall & landslide

uphill

76

Old road of S. Rocco

wall & soil instability

downhill

74

Old road of S. Rocco

wall fall & landslide

uphill

101

Old road of S. Rocco

wall & soil instability

downhill

100

Old road of S. Rocco

wall fall & landslide

downhill

125

Old road of S. Rocco

wall fall & landslide

uphill

126

Old road of S. Rocco

fallen bridge

uphill

124

Old road of S. Rocco

wall & soil instability

downhill

99

Old road of S. Rocco

wall & soil instability

downhill

70

Old road of S. Rocco

wall & soil instability

uphill

123

Old road of S. Rocco

wall & soil instability

uphill

120

Old road of S. Rocco

wall & soil instability

uphill

98

Old road of S. Rocco

wall & soil instability

uphill

90

Old road of S. Rocco

wall & soil instability

uphill

90

Old road of S. Rocco

wall & soil instability

uphill

82

14

Total cadastral units : State of deterioration / abandonment:

19 93%

As will be possible to understand from the photos we will show ahead, the woods are one of the main cause of the decline and disruption of both the drystone walls system of this landscape and its water canalization. Therefore we tried to find out if the municipality had done any survey concerning this problem 14

The fact that there are 19 different cadastral units, does not necessarily mean that the relation is: one unit one owner. It could very well be that, more then one unit belongs to one family with many members on the inheritance line. This means that it could also be that such division did not satisfy – as frequently happens in Liguria – all those having the eligibility to the property of that land and therefore, could very well be that there are still undergoing disputes among the families concerning who has the property rights of what and where. The task of the municipality of Camogli is precisely to find out who has what and where.

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and found out that the most recent document dates back to the first four decades of the 19th century15. In fact, between 1808 and 1868, every second year, there has been a systematic survey of the so called coppice forest i.e. an area of woodland in which the trees or shrubs were periodically cut back to ground level to stimulate growth and provide firewood or timber. This was a way of taking care of the land and also a source for the local economy that disappeared completely after the 70s of the 20th century. In 2010 the Region Liguria planned and carried out a vast classification campaign of its forested territory which results made clear that from the beginning of the 20th century till ten years ago the woods have conquered the 78% of all the regional surface16. Within the framework of this research there has been also an other coordinated field research for each area of the region that brought to the definition of the tree population typologies of these forests. This work, carried out both with activities on the terrain and with the use of digital technologies, produced a full typological inventory of the woods17. We have used the dynamic portal of this research to find out which kind of trees grow in the area in which we will intervene and found out interesting information on its current population.

Fig. 6 – Official regional forestry map of the ‘Barber Gap’ 15

ASCC, Folder 3, 1808-1868, items 1-4 Stato Generale dei Boschi del Comune. A first attempt to manage the woods problem was done later on by the royal decree of the king Carlo Felice of Savoy in 1822 called: Regio regolamento annesso alle Regie Patenti del 15 Ottobre 1822 per l’Amministrazione di Boschi e Selve in: Gazzetta Piemontese, n. 119, October 1824.

16 See: D. Penco, Rapporto sullo stato delle foreste in Liguria, Arezzo, 2010 available also online at: http://www.liguriaricerche.eu/upload_news_allegati/63_RAFL2010.pdf .

17 See the final relation on this research at: http://www.agriligurianet.it/it/impresa/politiche-disviluppo/tutela-economia-bosco/cartografia-dei-tipi-forestali.html and furthermore the dynamic portal that gives the possibility to access to the forest statistics and tree typology by each municipality rendering the map of the territory with a discrete precision.

See: http://srvcarto.regione.liguria.it/geoviewer2/pages/apps/geoportale/index.html?id=1593 .

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A part from the fact that finally we see in an official map the current name of the trail, Passo del Barbiere – in Italian and not in vernacular Pas do Barbè - the data emerging from this survey shows that, the 9.9 square kilometres on which the municipality of Camogli is spread, are covered by 9.8 square kilometres of woods consisting of 22 different tree typologies. To a first sight this seems to be positive, but if we look a bit deeper into such data and we historicize them, then we will discover that, in the turn of less then seventy years Camogli has lost the 90% of its agricultural production18. The consequence of this is that, out of the 32 kilometres19 of pedestrian streets available, up to the late 60s of the 20 th century, a good 20% is nowadays buried under such forestry explosion which, instead of being a security for the slopes, is precisely the cause of the soil instability and the disruption of its terraced landscape.

Region Liguria Official Tree Types Inventory 2018 - Camogli (Genoa) Municiplity Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Camogli Total: Total:

18

Tree Types

Sq meters

Na (forested but not identified – the grey zone in the map) Ostrieto Termofilo (OS20X) Macchia Termomediterranea Costiera Querceto Neutro-Calcifilo di Roverella Lecceta Xerofila (LE10A) Lecceta Xerofila (LE10X) Pineta Costiera di Pino Marittimo Pineta Costiera di Pino d'Aleppo Querceto Neutro-Calcifilo di Roverella Ostrieto Termofilo (OS20D) Macchia Termomediterranea Costiera Ostrieto Termofilo (OS20A) Ostrieto Termofilo (OS20B) Querceto Neutro-Calcifilo di Roverella, St. Termofilo Costiero Boscaglie d'invasione Cespuglieti Macchia Alta a Corbezzolo e Eriche Pineta Costiera di Pino d'Aleppo Alneto di Ontano Nero Ostrieto Termofilo (OS20C) Querceto Neutro-Calcifilo di Roverella, St. Termofilo Costiero Cerreta Neutrofila

4024959,18 1095074,10 881559,95 835972,12 646026,85 534129,37 435382,58 360064,74 304959,07 196441,07 174136,14 97075,84 72785,62 64570,91 43337,71 31978,74 23947,01 21870,73 13593,84 8493,70 5584,45 4144,93

22 Types Camogli Municipality area

9877242 sqm 9900000 sqm

See: P. Parodi, I Terreni agricoli. Il supporto ai terreni non produttivi in Liguria , Genoa, 2017, this study explains how to effectively use the EU structural funds in order to recover the abandoned terraces in Liguria and turn them into a source for a circular local economy; C. Campodonico, S. Ferrari, Camogli. Le vicende urbanistiche, in: Camogli. Persistenza e trasformazioni di un borgo di mare, Milano, 2009, 10-19. This study presents the socio-economic th transformations that took place in the municipality of Camogli from the end of the 19 to the st begining of the 21 centuries.

19 See: ASCC, Folder 50, item. 1, p.1.

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The following photo report should be geographically read going from east to west along Camogli’s coastline. This means that we will start from the locality of San Rocco the descent to the river Rio Gentile and then, following the track, climb uphill towards a flat peek called Chiappe and descending again to Via Pissorella where the track meets the first inhabited area of the upper hills of Camogli facing the see.

1. The entrance from San Rocco

a

2 . Descent to the Rio Gentile b

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2 . The hill side of the descending trail

3. Falling bridge of the Rio Gentile

4. Demolished ford on the Rio Gentile

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5. The ascent towards west st 1 wall fall and landslide

6. The ascent towards west nd 2 wall fall and landslide

8. The ascent towards west th 4 wall fall and landslide

7. The ascent towards west rd 3 wall fall and landslide Page 14 of 27

7. The ascent towards west rd 3 wall fall and landslide

8. Staircase ascent at the flat peak th Chiappe 5 wall fall and landslide

10. Staircase descent from the flat th peak Chiappe 7 wall fall and landslide

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9. Staircase ascent at the flat peak th Chiappe 6 wall fall and landslide

11. Arrival to Via Pissorella

From this photo report, that does not cover all existing damages resulting from decades of neglected care, we believe emerges the urge of planning and carrying out a full environmental recovery project of the area starting from its main trail. This, not only because of its historical and cultural value, but primarily because the entire set of slopes here presented are undergoing a severe hydrogeological instability. In order to face this danger and develop a perspective of future development we present hereunder the main objectives and methodologies of our project.

B. Objectives of the project (a) The trial/road renewal and the valley forest and river environment management plan.

The main structural objective of this project is to elaborate and validate a plan to carryout the full renewal of the trial connecting Camogli with San Rocco, called The Barber Gap (Passo del Barbiere) and at the same time develop a long term management plan for the entire environment of the River Gentile valley that from the slopes of Mount Portofino runs down to the eastern shores of town. The plan we foresee for the trail will deploy the use of dry-stone technology which implies to re-establish the full function of its uphill and downhill walls including its pavement. But this work would be useless if we would not consider that the trail disruption was caused by the careless growth of the forest surrounding it.

Therefore, we need also to develop a forest management plan finalized to revitalize it, offering in this way, beside the environmental re-qualification of the area, also an economic source for the municipality that will take over its administration. This source would be in terms of wood, olive oil and chestnuts production that may be covering only the maintenance cost but at the same time granting in this way its endurance.

The walls and pavements of this old trial where build in such a manner that they would work for two main purposes: the upper wall held the soil, the pavement collected the pluvial waters, the downhill wall sustained the pavement and the soil. Its kinetics was meant to prevent landslides even though the trial was cutting the slope side horizontally. Our proposal is to re-establish this structure by reusing the existing and scattered stones their available.

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This means that, for what concerns the walls and pavement a collecting methodology of the dispersed stones will be adopted (see ahead in the methodological section B). As said the main problem is what is around, uphill and downhill of the trail walls. If we twists some photos of our archive and turn them in to sketches taking away all wilderness20 colours, rendering in this way the image as an x-ray one, the invasive skeletons of the woods can show at their best the level of disruption we are talking about.

Fig. 8 Wall disruption

Fig. 9 Wall disruption

Therefore among our objectives there is the development of a systemic21 environment, forest and water management plan that should consider all 20

We set here the word ‘wilderness’ in italics because unfortunately there is still a spread opinion concerning the fact that a man made landscape holography could get back to it’s original status by simply letting that environment decease in a way that, no matter if there are artefacts in between, the phenomena of re-naturalization would take place along time. We have doubts on this concern, but we are certain that such model does not respond to the needs of the environmental conditions of the area we are talking about. See: P. Corona, R. Scotti, Systemic Silviculture, Adaptive Management and Forest Monitoring Perspectives, in: L’Italia Forestale e Montana, 66 (3), 219-224. See also: O. Ciancio, P. Corona, F. Iovino, G. Menguzzato, R. Scotti, Forest Management on a Natural Basis. The Fundamentals and Case Studies [in Italy], in: Journal of Sustainable Forestry, 9(1-2), 1999, 59-72.

21 What we mean here by systemic, within the landscape management, is that the renewal plan should to take into account all facets of the complex and interwoven phenomenology and relationships of man-land. This means that managing pluvial waters avoids soil erosion, as well as managing the forest growth means ensuring its health, which implies letting the forest work together with the dry-stone walls of the terraced system to sustain the soil and keep it in place.

Moreover controlling the forest implies also having a measure of the carbon-oxide catch that is

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concatenated causes in order to re-establish a balance between the human made artefacts, the forest and plants growth in such landscape.

A subset, but not least important, of works that are part of the long term objectives of the project, concerns the study, the planning and the renewal of all waterways that cross the trail to reach the Rio Gentile and the infrastructures that the trail needs to cross the river. As can be seen hereafter (the white is ours), from the 1981 census map, there are six different waterways that get into the Rio Gentile both from the eastern and western side of the valley. The only one that crosses the trail is the Rio Boschetto but nevertheless their tracks should be rebuild in order to take control of the water velocity and its impact on the terrain at the meeting point on our trail.

3/4 No name

2. Rio Scandelin 2. Rio Scandelin

Rio Gentile

1. Rio Boschetto RiverCrossing crossingpoint

5/6 No name 5/6 No name

Fig. 10 Map of the torrents – Census 1980-81

The waterways on the eastern part of the slopes may have vernacular names that unfortunately have never been reported and therefore from 3 to 6 these remain described as “no name” torrents 22. The importance of taking care of part of the work trees normally do. See: O. Ciancio, P. Corona, M. Marchetti, S. Nocentini, Systemic Forest Management and Operational Perspectives for Implementing in Italy, in: XII World Forestry Congress, Québec City, Canada, 2003; and a further work: S. Nocentini, G. Buttoud, O. Ciancio, P. Corona, Managing forests in a changing world: the need for a systemic approach, in: Forest Systems 2017, 26(1), 1-15.

22 The most recent study carried out by the Region Liguria on the torrents and rivers of this valley is: Ambito Regionale di Bacino 15, Piano di Bacino. Stralcio sul Rischio Idrogeologico. Relazione

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these waters is that, as you can see from the map, great part of the input is uphill of the point in which the trail crosses the river. For this reason would be needed, within the project plan, to consider a significant part of the work, the rebuilding of both the ford and the bridge on the river Gentile. The idea, that should be verified by engineers and architects, is to build a dry-stone lowered arch bridge (fig. 11).

The full round arch bridge, due to the height of its arch, in dry-stone buildings, would require to transport on site special wedge stones whereas, a bridge of this kind, if build with walls on both sides, with a lowered round arch recalling the classical roman full round one - often visible in Eastern Liguria such as the bridges called Sentiero delle Rocche di Sant' Anna 23 that are the remains of the Aurelian Road built, first by Catone (234 BC –149 BC), and finished by Scauri (163 BC – 89 BC) on the upper hills of Sestri Levante (fig. 12) 24 - could be built adapting local stones to realize the lintel arch.

Fig. 11 Lowered round arch bridge section

Fig. 12 Roman bridge in east Liguria

Idraulica in: Delibera della Giunta Regionale n. 998 of 28/10/2016, 51-53, that can be found at: http://www.pianidibacino.ambienteinliguria.it/GE/ambito15/documenti/GE_Amb15_RelIdr_rev06.p df . This study reveals that: the total surface of the area is of 2.62 square kilometres and administratively belongs to the municipality of Camogli. Its average altitude is of 222 meters on the sea level with a slope inclination of 41.4%. The river in its total length measures 2.49 linear kilometres with an average inclination of 9%. The river is generated on the slopes of the Mount Portofino and its side torrents with main water flux have been identified on the western side, namely: the Durazzo creek, Rio Boschetto, Rio Cò Bridge and Rio Scandelin. Only two of these can be seen in the detail of our map.

23 This trail is undergoing a relevant process of renewal, as can be seen from the acts of the municipality of Sestri Levante in the order: 2019/1800 Atti Amministrativi /Determinazioni: Intervento di Recupero del Sentiero delle Rocche di Sant' Anna, Cup: E19D17001790004: Approvazione Progettazione Esecutiva e Determinazione a Contrarre. The period of the project realization is foreseen as follows: 04/11/2019 - 31/12/2024. No educational plan is integrated in this activity and only one single firm Edilgiosso (Varese Ligure) has won the public competition.

The basic capital venture of 250.000 € is coming from the region Liguria (PSR – Plan of Rural Development), trough out the EU structural funds, and the rest will be granted by the municipality of Sestri Levante. This firm is a construction firm with no relevant specialization in the field of drystone walling, and/or cultural heritage, and/or landscape care.

24 See: E. Weber (ed.), Tabula Peutingeriana: Codex Vindobonensis 324 , Graz 1940, facsimile reprint 1976. Italian edition in: G. Ciurletti (ed.), Tabula Peutingeriana: Codex Videbonensis 324, Trento, 1991.

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For the time being, this part of the project objectives remains as a subset of the main ones, finalized to recover the most relevant areas of the valley: the trail, its surrounding woods, terraces and their rainwater ditches, which are currently all in such critical state of abandonment that may jeopardise, in near future, the access to the valley for good. Therefore restoring the main trail – and on the long term, renew also the others – would give the possibility to this area of the municipality of Camogli to get connected – by trekking or by mountain bike - with the neighbouring trail grid of the Portofino Park, enlarging the area for local agricultural activities and also for tourists that could be, in this way, better distributed on a larger territory and benefit of all nuances of this costal landscape and its natural capital. (b) The establishment of a permanent public school for dry-stone walling and terraced landscape care.

Within the framework of the renewal project a key objective is to establish a permanent dry-stone walling school that could be built, in synergy with the Faculties of Architecture, Forest Science, Geology, Earth and Life Sciences of the University of Genoa an other public entities (see ahead in part D), and grow as an institution granting the education for new generations to come on how to deal with the problems we have presented in point (a) of this section. This school would be the first in all Liguria and could follow some models already existing in other regions of Italy such as Piedmont, Lombardy and Trentino25. These schools unfortunately are recognized only by the regions in which they have been built, and at first, this would be also the case for Liguria. Nonetheless, the augmenting of public entities that recognize the existence and the professional profile of such work – the dry-stone walling - could create a chain that under the auspices of ITLA (IT)26 could finally see its recognition on all the national territory in the same way that happens in France, Switzerland, Spain and other European countries.

Obviously, the building of such educational infrastructure should start from a study-case, precisely the trail we are talking about. So that its development should grow step by step. At first the establishment of an open-air lab with a relatively small number of participants i.e. professionals in the field and students specializing in applied practices of environment protection and restoration. This action should move with in the framework of the Work Atlas of Public Jobs which

25

See: http://www.pierreseche.fr/abps/ ; http://www.medcenv.org/index.php?id=11. Other samples of schooling activity in this field can be found also in the Swiss Stiftung Umwelteinsazt at: www.umwelteinsatz.ch/de/angebot/schulklassen-10.html; or: h t t p : / / m o n v i s o institute.org/insights/design-philosophy/; https://www.accademiamontagna.tn.it/scuola-trentinadella-pietra-secco/ .

26 See: www.paesaggiterrazzati.it , International Associtation for Terracced Landscape, (Italian Section).

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in Italy referrers to the National Institute for Public Policies Analysis 27 in order to find its recognition as educational infrastructure in the larger field of the terraced landscape recovery activity understood as a cultural heritage work rather then simply as a construction practice, which, by the way, has different regulations and that can not be compared what so ever with the activity of dry-stone walling.

This recognition can be achieved if and only if the works are carried out within the pattern of an institutional management system that precisely should be the local municipality or other public entities. This should offer to the different professionals in the field the chance to be confronted with the many structural difficulties that such project poses. Among all, the fact that the slope inclination is above the 40% implies that the fallen stones, the movement of the dug soil uphill, the wood etc. should be managed by a significant manual system. This means that great part of the work will be based on infrastructures that will have to be built on site, using, for example, hand crane sets and other facilities that can be carried there per hand. The setting of a construction site will be part of the educational aims of the school activity.

A recent experience in the field has been done by the Foundation Manarola with the cooperation of the Cinque Terre Park28. The problem of such initiatives is always their endurance. If we do not think to a long term life of such infrastructure and therefore its possible funding within the framework of a sustainable agriculture and landscape maintenance market the scope will be missed. For these reasons our project will start from the development of a studycase that could give us the figures of how many and which kind of work forces will be available and which other would eventually be needed. Thereafter, if we meet the figures with which we reckon we can establish a permanent set of working agents to place into the work market, then we will pass to the establishment of a permanent structure to efficiently answer to the needs of the territory. At the same time the study-case can be the lab where administrative, work practices and coordination methods can be experimented and validated so that within the first year of work we can present to the investors and crowd funding networks a full long-term plan for such permanent infrastructure.

This perspective wants to focus on the fact that there is an urge of changing the exploiting model of land and resources, and is within these transformations that there is the possibility to re-establish a governed medium between what is available in terms of productivity and what is feasible in terms of development. The abandoned lands and their original infrastructures can be an excellent space where such model can be successfully experimented, at first for the benefit of the landscape itself, and secondly for the real economy that within 27

The Italian acronym of such institution is INAPP (Istituto Nazionale per l’Analisi delle Politiche Pubbliche) which already has a definition of what they understand as dry-stone waller, unfortunately still influenced form a very simple comparison with a construction mason rather then with the perspective of a worker profiled on focusing with environmental protection and its restoration. Nonetheless, it has a formal definition that can be seen at: https://atlantelavoro.inapp.org/dettaglio_profilo.php?id_profilo=12270&codice_repertorio=SR .

28 See: https://www.stonewalls4life.eu/ . Till nowadays this project does not seem to be able to give any constructive results nor work samples of any significative impact, as far as the information on its activity is available.

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that landscape is nowadays discarded by the overwhelming influence of the financial commodities in the agricultural market 29. As Paolo Baldeschi clearly says there is at the moment a fast changing of the economic perspectives for agriculture in Europe and all over the world, due to the decoupling of subsidies for single products. This means that the agricultural products will be governed by the market and not any longer, as it happened until recently, by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)30 . The effect of such political mutation is that the agricultural products – especially the basic ones such as wheat etc. – will not be any longer managed by a real market, but will become objects of the financial speculation, turning, in this way, into commodities. So that the real market, meaning the products that are not part of a monopolistic speculation, will be made of, apparently, non-essential goods, such as olive oil, wine, chestnuts, vegetables etc. Also these products are held, to a certain extent, by big industrial groups that act into the commodities speculation market, but still many of them are produced locally and could escape the financial brush-up influence building a web of sustainable circular economies by merging local markets.

The schooling system we have in mind should also teach to face this kind of market grid. Therefore, the education should consider not only the market of the dry-stone rebuilding on the field, but also the market of the goods production and their distribution. In this perspective, the recovery and care activity of rural and abandoned areas should take into account, as founding part of its development planning, the social, economic and cultural reemerging growth of the terraced landscape as a whole. It is clear that the schooling idea we bear in mind needs the intersection of many different knowledge and practices that we could shortly summarize in the following graph.

Fig. 13 - Dry-Stone Walling School Prototype Activity Flux 29

P. Baldeschi, Agricoltura e pianificazione, in: D. Poli (ed.)

Agricoltura Paesaggistica , Firenze University Press, Firenze, 2013, 112-113. Moreover see: R. Fennell, The Common Agricultural Policy: Continuity and Change, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1997; and A. Maniaghi, Il progetto locale. Verso la coscienza di luogo, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2010.

30 https://ec.europa.eu/info/food-farming-fisheries/key-policies/common-agricultural-policy/capglance_en .

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It is clear that the above graph wants to show only a sample of the activities this schooling system would like to merge, but gives already an idea of how many different workforces would be needed and should be coordinated within its research and field works. The full plan of this system can not be discussed in this paper but, as said, will be presented in due time to the investors and crowd funding agencies interested in the project we will present ahead in section (D).

C. Methodological choices 31 As we have tried to explain above we have taken methodological choices that follow the guidelines of the European Convention for Cultural Landscape (form now on ELC) 32. These can be summarized with the words of Salerno: “The nature of rural landscapes as heritage concerns all rural landscapes, either wellmanaged and degraded or abandoned. In some way, the approach proposed follows the idea of landscape envisaged in the ELC, extending worldwide its basic principles and applying the UNESCO notion of cultural landscape to every rural landscape. This kind of approach is an innovative and good example of farsighted heritage policies in view of sustainable management of land resources, going far beyond the so-called emergency approach” 33. These concepts are key to understand why such a particular case - as the one here proposed - can become model or part of a larger modelling of the Cultural Landscape as a whole. This means that a specific/local case can contain a number of care cases i.e. methodological and technological implications, that if identified and well resolved, can be reused in larger cultural landscape programs within the Italian national territory, or even abroad.

A merely conservative approach, unfortunately still very well spread, should be therefore replaced by a creative and sustainable one, accepting that to the many layers of human settlements, which in the past shaped the historic landscapes, today new layers can succeed and superimpose in such a way that can be fully compatible. A way that can create new connections between the signs of the past and the new signs, thus reinterpreting and re-imagining the 31

This section uses as main references the following papers: S. Di Fazio, G. Modica, Historic Rural Landscapes: Sustainable Planning Strategies and Action Criteria. The Italian Experience in the Global and European Context, Sustainability, 2018, 1-27; and: A. Farina, The Cultural Landscape as a Model for the Integration of Ecology and Economics, 50(4), BioScience, 2000, 313-319.

32 Council of Europe ( CoE). Guidelines for the Implementation of the European Landscape Convention. Available online: www.coe.int/en/web/landscape/guidelines-for-the-implementationon-the-europeanlandscape-convention. Moreover we refer here to the criteria of the International Scientific Committee on Cultural Landscapes ICOMOS-IFLA action table. See: http://landscapes.icomos.org/objectives/ .

33 R. Salerno, Far-Sightedness vs. Emergency: A Matter for “Not Outstanding” European Cultural Landscapes in: Buildings, 2018(8), 39. See also: K. Adhikari, C. Florence, G. Toth, L. Montanarella, Site Specific Land Management; General Concepts and Applications, European Commission, Joint Research Centre-Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Luxembourg, 2009.

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heritage received, welcoming the values they contain and revitalizing them in a new network of functions, activities, relationships. These are the main methodological lines that this project will follow.

“The heritage status of the rural landscape, on its turn, needs to be seen in a new way and some categories used to characterise it, such as historic or traditional, should be redefined. While in a sectorial approach, the recognition of this heritage status aimed to select a limited number of outstanding landscapes to be included in a conservation lists, most recent approaches tend to consider the whole rural landscape as heritage per se, and its historic characters an aspect simply related to its living nature. Therefore the management strategies of all rural landscapes should always be based on thorough consideration of their historic/cultural dimension and aim to a sustainable planning by integrating it with the other economic and environmental dimensions. The rural landscape as heritage, in fact, can play as a driving force of development if its cultural content is fully understood, interpreted and communicated, thus being able to generate a widespread awareness of local identity and distinctiveness” 34. In this perspective our project moves its steps considering at first the structural backbone of the slopes in the area examined – the Rio Gentile valley – that is the trail called the Barber Gap, and then enlarging the management problem to the whole view of that environment to present a full systemic plan for a long-term maintenance of its vital functions.

We have to face the fact that, as Farina puts it, “(…) substantial parts of cultural landscapes are heterogeneous agricultural areas, in which crop planting and management decisions are based mainly on interactions among soil characteristics, microclimates, and economic convenience. In a cultural landscape, cultivation is the basic activity controlling the size and spatial arrangement of fields and forest remnants. Water fluxes are preserved and soil nutrient cycles are optimized by the presence of hedgerows functioning as ecotones and buffers. (…) Terracing of steep slopes provides flat, arable land while maintaining slope stability, decreasing rates of soil erosion, and reducing water and nutrient losses. Remnants of natural open and forested patches provide connectivity for animal assemblages. The geometric order exhibited by a cultural landscape reflects the sequence of human actions regulated by seasonal, phenological, and economic cycle”35.

The case we are focusing on here belongs to those landscapes presenting a strong character but significantly affected by high obsolescence. Therefore, being in a poor condition, restoration appears as the best solution for its maintenance.

Restoration methods in this case should not be understood as a nostalgic return to a lost original landscape configuration but as the reconstitution of an harmonic and vital relationship between the whole components of that environment and of a satisfactory grade of resilience. The area we are taking into consideration is, as 34

S. Di Fazio, G. Modica, ibidem, p. 2 A. Farina, ibidem, 2000, p. 313. See also: B. Torquati, T. Tempesta, D. Vecchiato, S. Venanzi, C. Paffarini, The Value of Traditonal Rural Landscape and Nature Protected Areas in Tourism Demand: A Study on Agritourists’ Preferences, Landscape Online, 2017, 53, 1–18.

35

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we have explained above, very scarcely studied. Only a relatively recent research has taken into consideration the aim to analyze the complex system of the whole promontory of Portofino addressing digital methods and practices of data harvesting for its analysis and revaluation36. The methods applied in this investigation will be adopted to carryout the environmental plan we have suggested i.e. the terraced slopes renewal, the control of the forest and the waters.

Furthermore, all activities, theoretical and on the field will be digitized in order to produce an educational archive to be used in the schools as teaching material for courses on the terraced landscape and its environment. This activity will be done fulfilling the privacy wrights of all workforces involved. Moreover, this archive will be organized following the methods offered by the work carried out by the region Trentino since 2015 with its Atlas of the Terraced Landscapes37.

The making of the walls and the trails paving will follow the guidelines of the Artisans Bâtisseurs en Pierres Sèches (ABPS) school 38 together with those offered by ITLA (IT) with the recent work of Donatella Murtas 39.

Finally, the project will start from a theodolite relief map of the fallen walls and the moving slopes in order to evaluate the full square meters of work to be carried out and which forest management plan can be realized. To this map will be added an altitude map to plan the water management of the single parts of the trail. Once we have harvest all these basic linear, square and volumetric data we will have to cross them with the existing data set of the region Liguria on the area and develop a priority plan for the works on the field. These will start after at least three weeks of theoretical training of the workforces and will consist in the setting of the construction site and stone collection. Only after this activity we will have a full picture of what will be the figures of the real needs – in terms of work hours and materials – of the whole construction. With these figures we will be able to start the excavations and proceed towards the re-building of the trail.

D. A possible network configuration and project actors The network we are building should have as main contractor/s public institutions or organizations or both aiming to develop projects of environmental renewal and sustainable land management. Seeing that the area we have 36

Referred to the Rio Gentile on the Portofino’s promontory see: B. Pedroli, S. Tagliasacchi, T. Van der Sluis, W. Vos, Ecologia del paesaggio del Monte di Portofino / Landscape Ecology of the Monte di Portofino. Portus Delphini No. 2, (bilingual Italian-English edition), FERGUS ON, Wageningen, 2013, 104-105.

37 A. Cosner (ed.), Metodologia per l’individuazione e la classificazione dei paesaggi terrazzati in Trentino, 2015. See also: http://www.paesaggiotrentino.it/it/rapporto-stato-del-paesaggio/atlantedei-paesaggi-terrazzati-del-trentino/metodologia-per-lindividuazione-e-la-classificazione-deipaesaggi-terrazzati/ .

38 See: http://www.pierreseche.fr/abps/ecole/ecole-presentation/.

39 D. Murtas, Pietra su pietra. Costruire, mantenere, recuperare i muri in pietra a secco , Savona, 2015. Donatella Murtas is the actual president of ITLA (IT). See: http://www.paesaggiterrazzati.it/author/donatella/ .

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examined in this paper is property of the municipality of Camogli we had in mind to involve it in the competition offered by the Compagnia San Paolo40. Taking into consideration that the municipality could have an organizational timing that may go beyond the competition’s dead line, we thought to invite also other organizations such as ITLA (IT) to run for the funding. At the moment, this competition is focusing its investments only on projects carried out in the regions Piedmont and Liguria. This does not mean that actors from other regions can not join the project, on the contrary the merging of other experiences that share the aim of landscape renewal are very much welcome.

Among other we can quote hereafter the actors we have contacted and that have responded with interest in participating to realize the project we have presented above. In cooperation with the University of Architecture in Turin, in the person of the architect Gianni Bretto, the training organization called SEFORS VCO41 ( Sistema Edile per la Formazione e la Sicurezza del Verbano Cusio Ossola) – funded by the region Piedmont – has more then five years of experience in dry stone projects in the alpine part of the region with an ongoing multidisciplinary project called Costruire nel Costruito 42, have shown interest in our idea to build a permanent school for dry-stone walling and landscape care and would support our project.

An other technical and training cooperation could come from the Regional Agency for the dry-stone walls renewal of the province of Sondrio (Lombardy) that has in charge the maintenance and re-building of all the terraced vineyards of Valtellina. This agency works in cooperation with a private foundation called Pro Vinea 43 funded by the Popular Bank of Sondrio and could be one interested actor to widespread their competencies over to new projects. The latter, has worked already in cooperation with the main training actor in the field in Italy that is the Mountain Accademy of Trento 44 which would be one of the stronger supporters of our project.

Local actors and coordinators will be Collettivo Milarepa45 and Cooperativa Istrice that work on dry-stone walls and landscape care, and its training on the field in the last ten years in all the eastern Liguria. These should work in cooperation with the University of Architecture that has opend in the recent years courses for its students that could find in such a project the fullfilment of their training experience. Finally further support could come from 40

See: https://www.compagniadisanpaolo.it/ita/Bandi-e-scadenze/Bando-di-restauro-2020 . This is private foundation that invests in environmental and cultural projects. The actual competition offers a basis of € 350.000 as the 70% of the cost of the project that means the remaining 30% should be coming from other sources.

41 http://www.seforsvco.it/news/operatore-costruzioni-in-pietra-a-secco/ director of this organization is the architect Marco Porini.

42 See: http://www.alpstone.eu/it-IT/news/costruire-nel-costruito/ .Presenting the projects carried out till 2019.

43 See: https://www.popso.it/chi-siamo/iniziative-particolari/fondazione-provinea .

44 See: http://www.accademiamontagna.tn.it/scuola-trentina-della-pietra-secco which general coordinator is Massimo Stoffella. This is the most well organized institution in the field of traning for terraced lanscape renewal and maintenance.

45 https://www.facebook.com/CollettivoMilarepa/

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integrating this project within the framework of the Rural Development Plan (PSR) of the region Ligura.

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