One of the problems for the development of effective actions in defense of the landscape is tied to a still insufficient clarification of its contribution to economic development. Even if some researches have shown the prevalence of landscape values in the market value of typical products, its role in the service sector is not yet clarified. The lack of awareness of the opportunities for the development of rural areas, raises doubts about scenarios such as international competition for many typical products, if you can not benefit from the potential offered by the added value “landscape”, the real competitive not-reproducible feature of the Italian system.
The planning of new landscapes, the creation of design guidelines aimed at enabling the production, but bearing in mind the quality of the landscape and the respect of its features related to history and territory, enables to valorize the farm and its products. This implies not only a careful design of buildings and outbuildings, but also the arrangement of the various agricultural crops in the area, the design of the planting and farming techniques of the cultivated species. All of this has to be carried out with the dual aim of creating a place of production that is also attractive from the aesthetic point of view and, above all, that respects the history and the traditions of the territory, enhancing and maintaining a landscape that is not reproducible in any place.
The Verrazzano Castle, in the Chianti, represent a company that keeps togheter the wine and olive oil production, with a major agritourism activity. These characteristics, plus the need to renew the vineyards, provides the conditions for proposing a new design of the cultivations, with the objective to make available to the public a greater portion of the landscape, increasing its aesthetic value in accordance with production requirements. The area over the last fifty years has been undergoing important changes that have significantly affected the traditional landscape mosaic. The project does not intend to merely restore the historical landscape, but has instead chosen to produce a new landscape that is in part the product of the traditional values. This is expressed not only in the reinterpretation of the terraces, but also in the choice of materials and techniques in line with the quality of the Chianti landscape. The vineyard and olive grove represent the “entrance gate” to the farm, from where the visitors can enjoy the main view of the Castle.
The project is based on changing the architecture of the vineyards, opting for terraces with a height of 2.00 m, arranged along the contour lines at a distance of about 16 m one from another, so as to take into account the needs of the farm to use of mechanical equipment. The particular concave morphology of the slopes where the Verrazzano Castle lies, togheter with the terraces that control the erosion, create a visual effect of an amphitheater that allows people to fully appreciate the vineyard and the olive grove that are an expression of the beauty of the landscape of the Chianti hills. In addition, the terraces, ranging from the top of the slope to the valley, also continues around the castle in order to enhance it by re-establishing the visual hierarchy.
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Current view of the vineyard
View of the project
