When traditional architectural heritage can’t fit with contemporary ways of living. Some consideration through the abandoned rural settlements of northern Sardinia

Starting from the second half of the twentieth century, in the region of Northern Sardinia known as Gallura, the traditional heritage of rural dwellings known as stazzi began to be involved in different processes, connected to the economic boom and the gradual change in lifestyle of the local population: abandonment, transformation and demolition. The typological characteristics of these houses, often small, with few openings and low in height, together with their position generally far from the main centers, have made them unsuitable for the needs of technological progress or too complex to be transformed without excessive disruption. Today many stazzi have, in fact, new elevations and extensions, previously non-existent windows and doors, new roofs with different slopes and different external coatings with modern plasters and colors. Others have been demolished and replaced by more contemporary homes and still others have been abandoned. The abandoned stazzi represent the last chance to keep a trace of the peasant memory of the past. Today these structures are largely ruins, but they still preserve intact many of the characteristic elements of their rural use, such as the fences and terraces that delimited the pastures and cultivated fields. Their reuse for residential, tourist or economic purposes is not impossible, but experience shows that there are few examples of successful interventions. What to do then? Is it possible and sustainable to conserve this heritage just as ruins? Can these abandoned rural traces be preserved as nothing more than memorial landmarks of a past that seemed and seems incompatible with the needs of our present life?