Enhancing the Endogenous Potential of Agricultural Landscapes: Strategies and Projects for a Inland Rural Region of Sicily

This paper focuses on the potential of the rural landscape of Sicily, thelargest island in the Mediterranean Sea, taking into particular account the criticalneed to deal with the problem of depopulation of the small inner areas by leveragingthe “integrated exploitation” of local resources. The rural landscape is consideredto be capable of playing an essential role in many fields: ecology,production, culture and tourism. In this regard, guidelines are set by the SustainableDevelopment Goals of the United Nations, the EU guidelines and the experiencefrom Italy’s Rural Development Plans, the latter of which aim at achieving themuch sought-after multi-functionality of agriculture. This study has been conductedin our particular moment in history, when new attention is being drawn to thepotential of rural landscape due to its fragility, the crisis of traditional productionsystems and the changes caused by urbanization, which have had irreversible effectson many rural areas, based on traditional agriculture, and on ecosystem services.Keeping this goal in mind, the Sicilian case study should be considered as a sort of“test bench” where the validity of the abovementioned considerations can be tested.The area treated in this paper has been analyzed to highlight its particular features, thus proposing a“landscape project” called NetWalk.