Gran Sasso Laga Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) celebrates the intangible cultural heritage of the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga area. It is a tool of discovery, enhancement, and sharing of practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, as well as objects, artefacts, and cultural spaces associated with them that communities and individuals recognise as part their cultural heritage.
Gran Sasso Laga ICH, in the spirit of UNESCO Conventions and the Faro Convention of the Council of Europe, acknowledges the need to consider the individual and human values at the heart of a broad, integrated, and interdisciplinary concept of cultural heritage; believes the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage is essential for the social, cultural, and economic growth of the area; promotes the value and potential of cultural heritage wisely used as a resource for sustainable development and for quality of life, for the full realization of the human person in an constantly evolving society.
Gran Sasso Laga ICH offers an innovative narrative aimed at conscious exploration of intangible cultural heritage, stemming from in-depth knowledge and direct relationships with communities and witnesses, who are the primary protagonists in the practice and transmission of cultural heritage to future generations.
Today, the intangible cultural heritage of the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga is seriously at risk due to the depopulation of inland areas and the loss of cultural memory, both individual and collective, accelerated by the traumatic social and economic consequences of the earthquake. It is therefore to this territory that the project is primarily addressed.
By its very nature, Gran Sasso Laga ICH is an open and constantly expanding platform, which today continues to enrich its inventory, experiences, events, and is now enhanced by two new resources: the Abruzzo Digital Archive and the Magazine, tools designed to expand the possibilities of knowledge about the cultural heritage of Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga.
Framed within the broader project Living Gran Sasso, Gran Sasso Laga ICH focuses on the territories of the twenty-two municipalities included in the ATS UNICO Gran Sasso, spanning the three provinces of Teramo, L’Aquila, and Pescara through the Upper Valley of the Vomano river, the Sicilian Valley, the Upper Valley of the Aterno river, the Monti della Laga up to the Monti Gemelli, the Upper Valley of the Fino river, and the adjacent Upper Valley of the Tavo river, in the southernmost edge of the Gran Sasso mountain range: Campli, Castel Castagna, Castelli, Civitella del Tronto, Colledara, Cortino, Crognaleto, Fano Adriano, Isola del Gran Sasso, Pietracamela, Rocca Santa Maria, Teramo, Torricella Sicura, Tossicia, Valle Castellana, Barete, Cagnano Amiterno, Campotosto, Capitignano, Montereale, Pizzoli, Farindola. Completing this extensive itinerary, the municipalities of Arsita, Basciano, Montorio al Vomano, and Penna Sant’Andrea—already involved since the first implementation phase of the project—are also an integral part of the territorial network, revealing a network of routes that weave through the Apennines, that connect the mountains with the mid-hill landscape.
Preserving the memory
Abruzzo Digital Archive is the documentary heart of the project: a multimedia database designed for the preservation and access to sound, photographic, paper-based, and audiovisual documents from the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga area and, more broadly, from the entire regional territory. In this section you will be able to discover precious materials coming from direct field research and from institutional and family archives safeguarded thanks to public and private initiatives, and to a meticulous work of investigation, digitisation, cataloguing and processing aimed at their wide dissemination, including through themed collections. The primary documents of the digital archive and inventory of intangible cultural heritage – conceived as complementary tools of knowledge – interact with each other offering the user an integrated and in-depth discovery experience.
The Magazine dedicated to the intangible cultural heritage of Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga – MAGICH Magazine on the Gran Sasso Laga Intangible Cultural Heritage – is a space designed to explore specific aspects of intangible cultural heritage and documents preserved in the digital archive, through a narrative and visual approach.
