The cultural landscape on rural areas from Italian immigration

Abstract

This paper aims at recognizing the cultural landscape in rural historical sites of Italian immigrants as providers of patrimonial value and identity. The approach in respect of rural landscapes from the observations and analysis of cultural aspects and set of practices whose meaning helps to understand the true size of the rural heritage of Italian immigration. Its relevance is found in the study of the landscape transformation through values and habits of these communities, that results in a new patrimonial category named cultural landscape. The bibliographic research looked forward to showing the importance of the landscape as a patrimonial value provider and was complemented by a field research held in Rio Maior, in Urussanga, Santa Catarina state. Also a search was conducted on the location of Erto e Casso, place where they came from immigrants who started the colonization of the town of Rio Maior, in order to demonstrate the differences and similarities of architecture and landscape of Cassanos in Italy and produced by them in the southern state of Santa Catarina. The building collection of which the implantantion, architecture characteristics and construction techniques, unique in national territory, are witnesses of habits, costums and usage that characterize the immigration area in Santa Catarina state in XIX and XX centuries. This way it was possible to identify through the inventory of rural sites and visual analisis of the landscape, how the Italian immigrant has tranformed where he lived by the spacial organization of his house as well as his relation of exchanging with the nature.