Ad impossibilia nemo tenetur. Three case studies on built heritage elements at risk

The Built Heritage is rich, articulated and fragile, it is subject to human choices, bringing it to be well preserved and greatly enhanced in its good time and fall into despairing conditions during its bad moments. In our time a lot of precious buildings are at the risk to get irremediably lost and disappear, abandoned for long time and slowly becoming ruins. Probably this condition is common all along the human history, even if in our time our more sensible attention in the Patrimony makes it more hurting at our sight. But rarely people go beyond some blaming about the ruins they are seeing, considering the recovering of these masterpieces as something too far from their possibilities of intervention. So sometimes it is worth to face the emergency of such buildings with some direct and well aimed intervention, at least to document, survey and get the right knowledge about the building at risk. Projecting about it can be a right step to better understand the possibilities for a recovering, but the whole process can be a pain for the researcher, the architect, the lover of Cultural Heritage beauty, because it shows the lost occasion caused by improper use, improper management, abandon, abuse and ignorance. The core of this paper will be focused on three case studies about meaningful and rich architectures around Italy, the common elements between the chosen elements will be the occasional and emergency survey, done in quick and sometimes stealth mode, using digital solution or combining a mainly digital approach to more traditional techniques to produce a well detailed survey of the state of the building where only modest set of pictures were the only documentation until that moment. But also the bad management will be spotted on these case studies, signaling the lack of intervention, the leaving to itself, in a common resignation, these meaningful traces of our past. Last but not least, a great relevance will be given hypothesizing the possibilities of recovering to a full working role of these buildings. The main case studies will be the Medieval Mill and the “Hannibal’s bridge” in Bruscheto, near Incisa (FI); the Art Noveau “Terme del Corallo” main building in Livorno, the abandoned church of “Romagnano al Monte” (SA).