The town of Collodi: the vernacular heritage

The town of Collodi consists mainly of two parts, the ancient village perched on the hill and a settlement in the valley. The ancient castle, of which we have accurate information only after the twelfth century, still retains many of the characteristics of a medieval village. The planimetric development of this small settlement is highly interesting: both the main roads and the building aggregates follow the lines of the maximum slope of the hill, giving the entire skyline a cascading pattern. In the past two centuries, the castle of Collodi has not seen significant expansions beyond the perimeter of its ancient walls. Only the external roads have been adapted to the traffic of cars while movement inside the walls has remained exclusively pedestrian. For this reason, the structure still retains, for the most part, the vernacular features of the small settlements of northern Tuscany. These characteristics can be traced back using both the construction techniques and the typological elements. Through a careful study and an in-depth analysis of the buildings that characterize its typical elements, the vernacular architecture of the town can be both safeguarded and valorised. This paper means to illustrate the first results of the study on the entire vernacular heritage of Collodi, both the materials used and the architecture, which resulted in the identification of the unchanged parts of the buildings and the distinctive features that have been preserved, as well as the definition of the necessary guidelines for their restoration.