Stone routes and cultural heritage. a place-based toolkit for landscape-cultural mosaic assessment

The concept of territorial heritage is endowed with such complexity that the approaches that concern it often diverge. Fundamental vector of knowledge and local awareness activator through the construction of collective memory and territorial identity, takes on a variety of meanings that, over time, have led to semantic shifts, up to the protection and conservation of cultural heritage and landscape and the European Landscape Convention that introduced social perception in 2000. This leads to a vision of territorial heritage as a conscious and shared social revelation of the ecological, cultural,symbolic, economic potential inherent locally that gives rise to a defined social process “process of patrimonialization”, which can lead to a mobilization of assets in valorization actions. The paper intends to analyze how such patrimonialization processes find application in contexts of high economic marginality and environmental vulnerability with the aim of understanding how they manage to influence, at a local level, the governance processes, and, as territorial resource, to activate processes of innovation or retro-innovation at the base of the transformation of the rural world towards “recontadination”. The methodological framework used allowed us to verify how the proposed toolkit for the analysis of patrimonialization processes, in addition to activating specific paths of knowledge and understanding, is able to allow the activation of territorial resilience, understood as a community competence able to structure specific forms of social learning based on priorities identified and defined by local communities, through its model of territorialization, demonstrating how, especially in fragile contexts, such practices tend to establish new modes of relationship between local communities and institutions, and promote the participation of all stakeholders as an essential factor.