“BORGO PANTANO”, AN IRT PROJECT FOR SICILY BETWEEN TRADITION AND INNOVATION TECHNOLOGIES

Since the second post-war, the recent history of Sicily has been characterised by acontinuous depletion of the natural and historical Mediterranean landscape due to theunauthorized building often controlled by the expansion of the Mafia. Such trend was evenmore systematic along the coast, in the maritime villages and in the inland regions, wherethe new building, the uncontrolled development and the asphalt works have disfigured thelandscape and wiped out important testimonies of the past.So rather than the traditional tourism directed to bathing areas, minor islands and arttowns, the new forms of Integrated Relational Tourism (IRT) are the most compromised.Indeed, in the rural areas the historical landscape, as well as the territorial memory, has beenmodified often due to the migratory phenomena of the last sixty years. Nevertheless, asignificant part of the coastal and rural landscape of the island has been saved by the radicaltransformations of the 20th century: a large part of it is indeed still undamaged andconstitutes a substantial resource for Sicily. For instance, lots of rural villages, abandonedsince the post-war, are fairly restorable. However, only some of them are coming back tolife thanks to the devotion and perseverance of few men who are carrying out projects ofsustainable tourist development.Among these projects one of the most important is focused on Borgo Pantano, a ruralvillage of the Tyrrhenian-Peloritan region, harmonically integrated in a quite intact agrarianlandscape. The area is characterised by a cultivation mosaic of olive-grove, vineyard,orange-groove and several kinds of orchards. The hamlet, which lies in the administrativedivision of Rometta, dates back to the fifteenth century and comprises about forty houses.The church, located in the centre of the village, is dedicated to the Madonna of the Graces. Itis a meaningful example of rural architecture and one of the oldest of the whole district. Thelast inhabitants left Pantano in the Sixties. From then the village has been abandoned fordecades till a descendant of one of the old inhabitants decided to fulfil a dream: bringing Pantano back to life.So far the project has been promoted by the society “Incanti & Memorie” in partnershipwith OSETT (Observatory for the Economic and Tourist Development of the Tyrrhenian).The village has been added to the MOTRIS list, as the project is already being carried out.“Incanti & Memorie” shares the IRT aims of economic re-territorialisation, socialrecontextualization of regions and recomposition of cultural identities. Moreover, Pantanoproject was the first in Sicily to subscribe an Ethical Protocol for the restoration of thevillage, it was proposed to be registered in the Sicilian Region’s REI (Register forImmaterial Heritage), and has been subject for three graduation thesis. Progetto Pantanoaims to recover not only the buildings but also the traditional culture of the village. Thepurpose is in fact to recover as much as possible the existing elements in order to restore thevillage to its original appearance and its ancient productive, agricultural, cultural andreligious functions. In order to reach this aim, a trans-disciplinary study have been pointedout in the present paper. This is based on the development of a synergic investigationbetween socio-cultural and demographic analysis of the Pantano Village history, passingtrough the description and quantification of the historical agro-environmental developmentof the village. This two aspects were then integrated with the development of a GeographicInformation System (GIS) project, able to emphasize, by means of thematic cartographies,the promotion of the natural environment conditions as well as the role of the sustainabilityof the resource production in the recent past of the village.