From Rome Charter to Heritage Interpretation: innovative tools for the conservation, use and promotion of Natural and Cultural Italian Heritage

All the information contained in the "Charter of Rome on Natural and Cultural capital", approved in November 2014 during the Italian semester at the Presidency of the EU Council, and the declaration of Florence approved by ICOMOS, have recently focused the attention on the Environmental and Cultural Interpretation, a discipline that, if properly implemented, could have important outcomes for the conservation of our Cultural Heritage and the job market. The Heritage Interpretation, indeed, although already theorized since the fifties of the past century and considered, by several organizations and institutions, a powerful tool to manage natural and cultural resources, has been only recently widespread in Europe, developed, for example, by English Heritage or by the Scottish Natural Heritage in the UK. The European vision of the Heritage Interpretation extended its field of action from solely naturalistic and environmental issues, to those involving the historical and cultural heritage of the territories. The two domains, environmental and cultural, as evidenced by the Charter of Rome, are closely related and this relationship should be strategically strengthened. In Italy, the contents of the discipline have been adopted with greater delay if compared to the rest of the European context, but its strongly interdisciplinary connotation is an interesting factor that currently supports its diffusion. To confirm this, several initiatives are planned in the Abruzzo area hit by the 2009 earthquake, also based on a recent agreement signed between the University of L'Aquila, the CNR Institute for Construction Technologies, the Federparchi, the Roffredo Caetani Foundation and the Pangea Institute, aimed at promoting and developing training and research activities in the field of Heritage Interpretation. This paper is to disseminate the initiatives promoted according to this agreement: they are aimed at experimenting in a particularly rich environmental and cultural context - that is the post-earthquake reconstruction plans in Abruzzo - the opportunities offered by the Heritage Interpretation.