Discordant goals in Alpine rural heritage restoration: Discussion and proposals

Italian Alpine regions host a great number of vernacular rural buildings, once used in traditional agro-pastoral activity and now abandoned or transformed in holiday homes. In this last case their cultural value is generally eroded during the recovery process. Literature and field work analysis show that this is due to the confusion between discordant goals of the recovery itself. We need to explicit these discordances to improve the quality of restoration and its cultural sustainability. In order to do this we propose a qualitative, visually effective, evaluation grid, having tested it on some realised case-studies in the Italian Eastern Alps. This simple method overturns some common myths (in particular on energy efficiency) and raises the problem of eventually adapting norms, planning regulations and policies.