Among all the issues and the initiatives developed after the earthquake of Amatrice, it is worth spending a few words on the rural landscape. The Italian ministry of Cultura Heritage has promptly started an inventory of the damages to the local cultural heritage: palaces, churches, museums, statues etc. But, who will take care of the rural heritage and the farmers?
This is a typical internal italian rural area where the economy is based mostly on agriculture and agritourism, in fact 84% of the italian agritourism occurs on mountains and high hills. This is not only the place of the “spaghetti alla amatriciana” and , although taking into consideration the initaitves of the italian restaurants to use a part of the income when ordering this dish for the reconstruction, we have to consider that the area is chartecrized by a very high number of farmhouses and small rural settlements , deserving the same attention dedicated to the rest of the Italian cultural heritage. The farmers, their houses, the fields and their animals are the core of the rural landscape and the cultual heritage of the area. Hopefully somebody will take care of that too, as we already have enough reasons for 10.000.000 ha of abandoned framed land in the last decades, we do not really need also an eartquake and the usual lack of attention for the rural landscape to have more.
