The Cleaning Interventions in the Manarola Amphitheater are underway

by Ludovica Schiaroli

Stonewallsforlife project gets to the heart: started in July 2019, it foresees in five years the recovery and restoration of over five hectares of terraces in Manarola, in the Cinque Terre National Park, to increase the resilience of the territory to climate change.

In recent days, the process of assigning the works of the first lot within the pilot site, the amphitheater of Manarola, has been completed with the aim of removing the rampant vegetation from the land and thus being able to verify the state of conservation of the walls to subsequently proceed with the restoration of the dry stone walls. Once the project is completed, the land will be cultivated with vineyard implants and other types of crops.

In detail, the farms in charge (selected through the list of subjects authorized by the Park Authority to carry out interventions on the territory after the publication of the call) will have ninety days to clean the uncultivated land from the vegetation present, mainly Mediterranean scrub (heather, broom and other). Overall, the amount of the work corresponds to approximately 23.000 euros.

The area affected by the first intervention is 8.110 square meters (divided into two sub-lots 2A: 3.924 square meters 2B: 4.186 square meters) which correspond to 55 cadastral parcels, with an average area of 147 square meters each.

The first lot landowners are about thirty, the phases of researching the owners and stipulating the authorizations to obtain the availability of the land and proceed in this way with the execution of the works were carried on by the Manarola Cinque Terre Foundation, which is one of the project partners.

A particularly complex job due to the extreme territory micro-fragmentation and the difficulty it had to face in identifying and contacting the landowners.

The Project run-up was carried out by the Cinque Terre Park Authority and by the DISTAV – Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Genoa who took care of tracking a territory cognitive picture (geomorphological and geological of detail survey) useful for then deciding which interventions to carry out to make the area on the back of the Manarola town safer.

«The battle against climate change requires innovative approaches capable of integrating scientific knowledge to the traditional ones. – The Cinque Terre National Park President Donatella Bianchi has declared – Stonewallsforlife is a concrete example of the implementation of this paradigm, reinterpreting in a current key and with modern monitoring tools, the effectiveness of the dry-stone wall construction technique for maintaining of the geo-hydrological balances of the Cinque Terre area. The start of the land cleanings by the local farms, which will be followed by the reconstruction phases of the terraces and their cultivation is a further added value of the project which highlights the effectiveness of multifunctional agriculture and bring back the centrality to the man in the scope of construction and protection of the landscape.»