Protection and Values of the Cultural Heritage of the Campagna Romana between Public Policies and Movements from below

The list of the UNESCO World Heritage sites includes several metropolitan rural landscapes. These landscapes – such as the vegetable gardens of Valencia (Spain) or the vineyards of Xuanhua (China) – are recognized as World Heritage being Cultural Landscapes, symbol and evidence of the peculiar co-evolution between city and countryside. Rome always had a strong relationship with agriculture: since the beginning, cultivated landscapes gradually replaced the surrounding pre-existing woods. The hortus and the villa in the ancient Roman era, the medieval terrae sementariciae, the vineyards and the Renaissance villas, the eighteenth-century large estates and the drained agricultural lands in the early twentieth century are the main forms of colonization of the territory by the city: they anticipated the contemporary urban expansion by structuring permanently the territorial development of the region. In Rome, the outcome of the city-countryside co-evolution is threefold. Firstly, the strong urban dispersion often exploits the patterns of agricultural landscapes and absorbs – by isolating them – numerous historical and archaeological remains (in 2018 21.9% of the land was irreversibly consumed); secondly, the metropolitan area is still characterized by an extraordinary historical, landscape and ecological-environmental value (with 144,550 ha of protected natural areas, equal to 21% of the national figure, 34 wetlands, 51,000 ha of archaeological sites and parks, etc.); finally, the local community is increasingly sensitive to the issues of rural-environmental sustainability, and is more and more engaged in promoting a more active, healthy and inclusive rural-urban lifestyle (in 2019 the European Sidig-Med program conferred the title of European capital of urban gardens to Rome). In relation to the aforementioned background, the conservation of large traditional agricultural landscapes is a pivotal condition for protecting the whole urban environment (in Rome 60% of the area of parks and reserves is occupied by agricultural uses, whose surface increased by +12% in the last decade); the most recent experiments of participatory multifunctional agriculture projects have been able of renewing the meaning of preserving the urban agricultural heritage. These are “edible urban landscapes” which, although widespread throughout Europe, are capable of reinterpreting and enhancing the local specificity and differences of metropolitan cities, initiating processes of formal and socioeconomic – and not just ecological-environmental – regeneration of the vast contemporary urban sprawls.