Mountainous abandoned areas and territorial fragilities. Cultural preservation, reuse, improvement strategies.

Fragility is the condition of being easily damaged, with poor resistance to trauma, stresses, and negative situations. This concept, if attributed to a territory, can refer to the weak ability to respond to natural cat-astrophic events and social or economic changes. Mountainous territories feature hydrogeologic fragilities related to periodic upheavals in anthropized areas and are connoted mainly by institutional and economic fragilities, which have increased in Italy since the anthropologic caesura of the post-Second World War period. Since the ‘70s, the desire for re-covery and recolonization of rural areas has begun to grow. However, real recolonization has never hap-pened in the mountains. Re-inhabiting needs to ensure economic sustainability, understood as self-subsistence, and environ-mental sustainability for the preservation of the landscape and local biodiversity. The circular econo-my is considered a strategy, given that it does not contemplate the concept of waste: all that is discarded from one biological system becomes a raw material for another. This paper presents an ongoing study that is part of two research grants1 aimed at investigating methods and strategies for regenerating abandoned mountainous areas starting from the reflections on the so-cio-economic and environmental processes that underlie their fragilities.