Guidelines for Eco-efficiency in the UNESCO Site of Cinque Terre: An Example of Good Practice

The World Heritage property “Cinque Terre, Porto Venere and the Islands Palmaria, Tino and Tinetto”, in the extreme eastern Liguria, represents one of most renown examples of protected cultural landscape. For its morphology, the relatively difficult accessibility and thanks to a safeguard policy initiated well before World War II, the territory could be spared by the great 1900s transformations which have impacted most part of the Italian countryside. Nonetheless, over the last few decades, in the face of a progressive reduction of the agricultural activity which imprinted to this area the shape for which it is worldwide appreciated, it has seen amplified its notoriety as a tourist destination, which, as a consequence, has implied transformations to the rural built heritage to meet new comfort and functionality exigencies, or just for taste choices. Although modest in size, these widespread modifications have induced evident changes to the coastal and the hilly landscape, through minor or major maintenance/upgrading interventions, which have escaped an effective govern of the territory, despite the control activity by the bodies responsible for landscape tutorship. In relation to the landscape values at stake and to the most recurrent exigencies, the Regional Directorate has reputed more appropriate concentrate the study on the improvement of energy performances of individual buildings and technical systems for individual energetic supply: these, although reduced in size, for their high number, end up to have a significant impact on the landscape and on the historic built heritage. Therefore the research has not examined the possibilities and criticalities of larger facilities for energetic production with respect to the features and vocations of the territory - in this regard, it is worth mentioning that the Italian legislation in force only permits to identify areas not suitable for the collocation of these installations - however, this aspect remains strategic for an effective energetic policy which considers the vocations of the territory to the use of these sources and does not entail drastic alterations to the historic built heritage and to the landscape.