Ecclesiastical Heritage, Risk and Planning: A Large-scale Approach to Protection and Prevention

Abstract

Religious architectural heritage is largely widespread on the Italian territory and it is subject to several kind of risks, particularly concentrated in Italy. Exposure to risks, worsened by underuse and lack of maintenance of these buildings lead to the necessary development of conservation, reuse and transformation strategies in order to preserve this heritage in a safety state. In this perspective, this contribution presents first results of a research project conducted by Politecnico di Torino, which developed a tool for vulnerability and risk rapid analysis of the ecclesiastical religious heritage. This method assumes large and systematic knowledge about the aforementioned heritage. It can be used for decision support and planning of interventions and activities by heritage managing bodies in order to optimize strategies by considering territorial, safety and architectural suitability. Although the proposed method can not be applied to the heritage of religious orders and congregations, due to the lack of an official census, this contribution allows to design new scenarios of research and reflections to be conducted in future studies in the field of reuse and transformation of religious heritage.

Keywords

• ecclesiastical heritage
• risk
• italian census of churches