DISUSED RAILWAY LINES. RECOVERY AND ENHANCEMENT

In the hinterland of the South Italy there are many railway lines with related works of art and abandoned service buildings, sometimes forgotten. These railways come completely, tobepart of the industrial archaeological heritage, that you have to restore and enhance, as they represent the result of a process of change and a new way to “live” the territory. The paths, climbing through the mountains, engaged technicians and workers in impressive works of containment and consolidation, in addition were created works of art that are still, thanksto boldness, monumentality and insertion in the landscape, the most eloquent testimony of the technique applied in the beginning of the century for construction of railways. With this paper we want to show how the actions on individual railway lines may be different, but they all turned to the recovery and improvement of existing facilities providing in some cases, the conversion of railways (greenways) and service facilities (staging points, studies and multifunctional centers) and in other cases the reopening of the routes through policies of social, cultural and landscape regeneration. We propose a methodology of approach to the problem of preservation of artifacts that mark the railway lines, which takes into account the difficulties of functional conversion of all buildings because of their structural fragilityand the inadequacy of the technological characteristics of the existing structures and therefore the need for intervention by a sustainable design closely related to their reuse and thereduction of energy consumption. The goal is to demonstrate how these small buildings, now considered outdated and obsolete, wrapped from decay and neglect, can become examples of architectural excellence and technological efficiency through sustainable design, which provides for measures compatible with the historic building technologies and, at the same time, directed to be self-sustaining from the energy point of view.