APM – Archeologia Postmedievale, 23, 2019

Description

If the Cistercian abbey of San Galgano in Tuscany is a medieval site of international fame for its historical, architectural and landscape characteristics, the events of its abandonment and its deconstruction are much less known. The research just begun in 2019 in San Galgano suggests that archeology has great potential to write relevant pages that will little or nothing be of interest to the history of architecture, but much to that of the events of the monument and its functional, economic and environmental transformations in the structuring of the new post-medieval landscapes, with the introduction of sharecropping. A far-reaching historical theme to which this essay brings us closer, which implicitly relaunches an archeology of sharecropping sometimes touched upon by archaeological research but never faced with an excavation of this quality and extent, which underlines the transition from a monument of European dimension to fully marginalized rural area.
Giuliano Volpe's contribution is original and innovative above all for the methodology, for a reflection on the unexpected potential, also qualitative, of the heritage and on the theme of the delicacy of structural intervention in the recovery of historic buildings, which for the information itself, useful and however important for the study of the transformations of a sample of the medieval historical center of Foggia, following the earthquake that struck this center in the XVIII century.
The research group of Medieval Archeology of the Ca 'Foscari University of Venice discusses the contribution of archaeomalacological data for the interpretation of the formation processes of archaeological stratification and its interpretation. The case study, located in the historic center of Marano (Cupra Marittima), appears significant, as it underlines the role of the (qualitative and quantitative) study of malacofauna to identify the pauses in the growth processes of the stratification and the formation of ruderal landscapes, sometimes extensive, sometimes limited to single environments.
Chiara Maria Lebole and Roberto Sconfienza present an important study on the military architecture of the Duchy of Savoy in the seventeenth century, as the authors illustrate the results of the research on the field defenses between La Thuile and the Piccolo San Bernardo at the end of the seventeenth century century, conducted as on other occasions with an intense interaction between written sources and archaeological sources.
Luciano Mingotto's essay on the restoration and stratigraphic investigations carried out during the restoration of the seventeenth-century villa Morlini-Trento in costozza di Longare (Vicenza), starting from this case study also suggests a more general reflection on the theme of the protection and documentation of traces of the transformations over time of the architectural heritage represented by the great aristocratic villas of the modern age and of the fragility of the remains of construction, functional or decorative actions.