Re-defining the relationships between the tangible and intangible heritage: the rock-cut village of Vitozza, Sorano (Tuscany, Italy)

In recent years, underground architectural heritage has attracted significant interest among specialists and the public. This novel empathy goes beyond the most celebrated monumental structures and is paid to magic “genius loci”, to symbiotic natural and carved built environment. The awareness that small centres with few dwelling or broad underground areas should be considered a unique habitat in which natural components and human-made artefacts are part of the same cultural landscape has led us to create an original aesthetics of representation. Underground living, even in its visible romantic expression - characterised sometimes by apparently uncontrolled geometric forms- is part of a continuing process including necessary changes and adaptation to respond to the environment and social constraints. The village of Vitozza in the Sorano area in Tuscany is a significant example of this perfect integration of human habitat and environment. The tufaceous landscape stretches across a hill between two rivers and is characterised by an urban structure perfectly integrated into the environment. In this paper, the interplay between the urban form and human artefacts is described to represent the aspects that characterise living underground. In particular, we investigate the relationship between single units and their surroundings, the aspects of light and darkness and their variations according to the different seasons, and the geometrical features that generate a natural continuity between the interior and exterior. For doing so, Lidar scanning and structure from motion techniques have been used to document the site at different scales in various phases. The data collected have been analysed and represented considering human and urban scale to highlight the relationship between the tangible and intangible heritage of a complex reality that has been evolving for different centuries.