The Cattle-Track’s Cultural Heritage Preservation: Rediscovery Ancient Paths and Landscape Valorization by Historical Maps and GIS Environment. The Case of Tuscany Transhumance Routes

Many Italian regions, particularly Tuscany and vast areas of the Mediterranean Europe, have experienced the transhumance phenomenon, a found-ing element in the history of many farming communities. The paper intends to illustrate an integrated method of analysis of transhumance routes in a GIS environ-ment and their potential use for cultural and rural sustainable tourism, through the connection between archive documents and computerized cartographic tools. The study, through the use of geographical information systems, historical sources and cartography, has identified led to the identification of a Tuscany transhumance’s net routes and relative toponymal map. The research results form the basis of rural tourism development tools and are a fundamental model for rediscovering and valorizing the cattle-track landscapes. On the other hand, the development of new forms of tourism could promote the conservation of transhumance routes, enhanc-ing their role in local growth and improving income levels of the rural marginal areas. Transhumance represented a complex socio-economic system, cattle-tracks being its basic infrastructure. With the transhumance decline, the cattle-tracks have been re-used to build roads or farms, almost deleting such a network, making urgent to know it again in order to set forth recovery actions. The rediscovery of the great social, rural and cultural value of these transhumance routes, allows the transfer of historical memory to the new generations, the creation of startups focused on breeding and processing milk and meat, and the planning of “new” cultural tourist itineraries for the development of sustainable mobility.