Paper short abstract:

In Tuscany a group of people is struggling for the preservation of a small natural wet area. The paper will focus on how this community appropriated the heritage paradigm and is using it in their struggle for defending this natural area which they are submitting to a process of heritage making

Paper long abstract:

In one of the most industrialized area in Central Italy between Florence, Pistoia and Prato an informal group of people, is struggling for the preservation of a small natural wet area from the aggressive development of factories, mostly nurseries, which have completely changed the landscape. This group of people could be analyzed as a sort of "heritage community" which, according to the Faro Convention (2005),"consists of people who value specific aspects of cultural heritage which they wish, within the framework of public action, to sustain and transmit to future generations". This small wet area is characterized by a heritage making process still in progress which, according to my filed work started in the middle of the 1990s. A group of people is working in order to give this area a new historical and aesthetic value.

In the last years this heritage community started to preserve local memories trough interviews to old peasants on farming and fishing practices no more in use. In 2009 this group of people gave birth to an association, which installed an ethnographic collection mostly linked to the agricultural past, in an old farm within this natural area. 

I will focus on how this group of people, in fighting its daily battle, appropriated the "heritage paradigm" and used it in their struggle for defending this natural area which they are submitting to a process of heritage making.