Fabbriche religiose e itinerari di culto. Temi di storia e recupero

The presence on the Italian territory of itineraries of historical cult, along which have arisen networks of religious buildings, offers to the attention a very rich heritage, architectural and landscape, in good part today decommissioned if not reduced in conditions of neglect . Among other examples we note the rich abbeys system, convents and monasteries, functional to the cult of St. Michael the Archangel, widespread in the Gargano from the sixth century and supported the "sacred way" traveled by pilgrims, often on the track of the oldest routes . Of this system today remains very little. The ancient routs have fallen into oblivion or have been employed by many other infrastructure, road and not only. Few buildings still active, and in a good state of conservation, but many are reduced to ruins, with an incidence almost always proportional to the distance from population centers and traffic flows and communication. This paper tries to retrace the articulated story of these buildings, on the basis of first-hand documents resulting from accurate measurements of their geometry and their formal structure and residual material. The purpose is not only the networking of building actually inseparable from the territory of belonging, often with a strong impact on the landscape, but also the verification of the wide horizon recovery projects, emancipated from confusion between conservation and speculation and coinciding with the enhancement and virtuous recovery actions.