Plants like ruins and ruins like plants. How to manage the interaction

The relationship between ruins and vegetation involves a wide range of different fields of research. Following a brief examination of how the perception of the co-existence of ruins and vegetation has changed over time, the various different approaches that these different fields have adopted when tackling this issue are investigated. As specifically regards conservation, the main issue is now the management of change, an inevitable process when it comes to the co-existence of ruins and nature and, particularly, ruins and vegetation. Limiting ourselves to adopting measures designed to stop, or rather slow down, the increasing level of entropy (and therefore disorder) may not be enough. The paper ends with a brief presentation of a few practical examples of projects carried out from the early 1900s on.