Documenting cultural heritage in rural areas for its understanding and for a development perspective: a map for the Orsini Park in Pitigliano

TThe Italian territory is littered with artifacts and rock monuments that are an integral part of the place and reveal its history and culture. Sometimes these are brought into museums to preserve them and be able to communicate their history and relevance, sometimes this would distort their essence, or it is impossible for the type of artifact. The GIS technologies allow its localization respect to global reference system and through it is possible to create thematic maps useful for monitoring the assets and for understanding the territorial system, network, and relations between all the single elements. The present study analyzes the Orsini Park in Pitigliano, an example of a cultural heritage scattered throughout the territory and of which scant information is available, to create an overall framework of what is still legible today. A framework of knowledge is essential for subsequent recovery and project phases, but it is also useful for making public information available to know the park. The Orsini Park is made up of stone elements carved on the tuffaceous outcrops along the slopes of the wooded spur adjacent to the village: seats, sculptures and panoramic points that overlook the valley of the Lente river and towards the town. The park, defined mannerist and with clear links to the garden of Bomarzo, represents one of the rare examples of sixteenth-century gardens in the Tuscia area. There is a lack of archival, cartographic, and iconographic documentation that prevents us from knowing its history and the original boundaries and structures. It is known that the park was built by the Orsini family, probably around the middle of the 1500s; legend has it that the last god of the Orsini Count killed his wife for reasons of jealousy. The park was abandoned when the town of Pitigliano fell into the hands of the Medici family, at the beginning of the 1600s. Perhaps it was the park of a villa of which no trace remains today, and which was already destroyed in the nineteenth century. The value of this testimony is undoubted, but today it remains abandoned to itself on the hill Strozzoni, accessible through unmarked paths that are taken from a plateau to which one arrives from a secondary road that one takes from the road directed to Sorano. The creation of an adequate and themed cartographic representation is fundamental in a first phase of research. Thanks to the use of a GIS software and through a census and a GPS mapping, it was possible to create a first map of the elements of the park georeferenced that shows the real distribution of the finds. These are categorized by type and analyzed individually in detail by instruments that also allow digital representation. Furthermore, programs for geospatial data processing are useful to carry out interdisciplinary analyzes allowing the superposition of the data collected with the themed maps of the territory.