Paesaggi ritrovati. I terrazzamenti lariani attraverso il Catasto lombardo-veneto

REDISCOVERED LANDSCAPES. THE LARIAN TERRACES THROUGH THE LOMBARDO-VENETO LAND REGISTER – Terraced landscapes have seen a considerable increase of interest by studying and research. Nevertheless, so lot remains to deepen and discovery, as the Larian terracing, with its 1.800 hectares of extension, among the largest of Italy and the Alps. Today, almost nothing remains of the historical terraces, after the disappearance of vineyards occurred at the beginning of XX century. In fact, woods and urbanization have quickly erased almost every traces of this historical landscape. The Lombardo-Veneto Land Register, written by Austrians starting from 1854, offers a detailed scanning of the region, reporting terraced surfaces analytically, municipality for municipality. Ideally, review and analysis of these data allow to rebuild form and characters of this historical landscape by calculation of terraced areas and rediscovery of agricultural crops, as vineyards, olive trees, mulberries, cereals and potatoes.
At the same time, with the rereading of data on a supra-local scale, we can identify some areas that represented almost all of the terracing. They were opposed to the contexts in which the use of grassed embankments was instead prevalent or exclusive. Beyond the itself discovery, the use of Land Registers to study historical terraced areas still remains an unprecedented idea at a similar scale. Therefore, it could be an interesting approach that can be replicated with unpredictable results, as much to more areas.