Sistema viario e Comunità rurale in Valle d’Aosta

In this "Alpine culture notebook", which constitutes the first example of collaboration with the Valbeni of Aosta, the theme of rural roads is addressed by examining the Aosta Valley case. The dense network of roads, mule tracks and paths that, over the course of history, has developed in a mountain area such as that of the Aosta Valley, is examined and interpreted in this volume not only from a typological and structural point of view, but also from a light of the close interdependencies that have arisen with the historical, cultural and socio-economic events of the rural community that this road system has created, defended and maintained over the centuries. In this work the authors therefore suggest a reading of "rural mountain roads" as a cultural heritage of the Alpine populations, on a par with what is recognized for architecture or ethnographic heritage; the implications they highlight range from peculiarities in the use of forms and materials to construction techniques, from service functions to the local community to models of community management of the works, from the economic to the even religious relevance of some road structures. It will therefore be possible to deduce from the pages of this notebook the value of an "atypical" cultural asset such as the historical route, which for a long time was perhaps underestimated both in the field of historical research and in the broader field of human geography and anthropology. cultural.