Urban cultural heritage and disaster: the castle of cross destinies

Italy is a country which vulnerability to different hazards is well known. The history of reconstructions after severe event as the earthquake in XVIII century in Sicily or the 1915 in Marsica shows diversity in terms of approaches and perspectives and also regarding failures or success. The second half of the XX century focused in the concept: “where it was as it was”. It was considered the only one possible plan but it’s not sustainable anymore, for different reasons starting from the economical crisis. It seems also a failure when we analyze the data of land consumption and urban sprawl or sprinkle (Romano et Al., 2019) of the reconstruction extramoenia. The recent history has shown that the successful cases were a result of an equilibrium between the spatial planning, the risk assessment and multilevel governance. Many Italian cities are rich with priceless world heritage sites. However, the geography of this country located in the earthquake-prone zone makes dwellers and the heritage sites at risk of earthquakes that could lead to another consequent disaster, such as landslides and volcano eruptions. In addition, this risk is increased by an uncontrolled urban expansion into areas vulnerable to disaster, thus making disaster risk management even harder to achieve. It should be remembered that 60% of Italian municipalities and 40% of the national population live in areas classified from 1 to 3 for the danger of seismic risk, that if we look at the hydro-geological risk the landslides surveyed affect 6.9% of the national territory and the municipalities concerned are 5,708 while if we hope for the phenomenon of floods the population exposed is about 6 million (Peppoloni, 2014)2. However it's common to think that tsunami doesn't affect Italy, a 2006 earthquake (M5) with the epicentre close to Stromboli, which luckily did not cause victims or severe damages, caused a small tsunami. In Italy, tsunami has but low probability, however it’s better to keep in mind that “low” differs from “none”.