Il sistema costiero molisano. Storia e fruizione di un patrimonio territoriale

The doctoral thesis reconstructs the territorialisation process of the natural coastal space of Molise reflected in the landscape as the result of the encounter between nature and man over a long period, with a focus on the period between the 18th and 20th centuries. The research, while anchored to the history of the territory and the environment, consisted of a multidisciplinary analysis aimed at identifying the resources, vocations, potentialities, basic identity features and physical and biological textures of the stretch of coastline between the Trigno and Fortore rivers, to define the territorial heritage and understand the dynamics and transformations that have occurred in the area under investigation. This is with a view to restoring value to those 'places', i.e., man-made environments endowed with identity, personality, and landscape individuality. The territorial context of reference, defined as the Molise Coastal System, includes the four coastal municipalities of Montenero di Bisaccia, Petacciato, Termoli and Campomarino, but for certain issues it extends to the sea and the hinterland, following the relations that have historically been woven between these two large territorial components. The research shows how the processes of industrialisation and globalisation, especially because of the radical changes that have taken place in the Mediterranean routes over the last two centuries, have in fact broken the economic and cultural link that once united the coast with its hinterland, causing the port of Termoli to lose relevance. In today's fast-changing world, it is necessary to intervene as soon as possible to safeguard the historical textures of the landscape, starting with the perception of local communities and the development of an awareness of place. The link between the coast and its hinterland can certainly no longer be the one that existed in the 1700s or for much of the 1800s, but it could be stitched together with different logics that recover a past linked to the sea, to reinterpret it and revitalise it according to the demands of the present. To do this, it is necessary to start again from the territorial heritage as the fruit of history and reconstruct new relations and functions, thus prefiguring an integrated local system, with a governance that envisages the participation and involvement of local actors, moving from sustainable development to self-sustainable local development. The study led to the conclusion that the Molise coastal area can to all intents and purposes be considered a territorial system, in turn connected with the hinterland and the other side of the Adriatic, and as such become an interesting laboratory for local development. For this reason, the thesis concludes by converging the results of the analysis in the project idea of an ecomuseum of the sea as a tool capable of documenting, recovering, and making the territorial heritage usable, also favouring the regeneration of adequate coast-inland relations, experimenting and developing the idea of the coast not as a demarcation line between land and sea, but rather as a territorial strip of integration between the two elements.