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, the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, taking into particular account the critical need to deal with the problem of depopulation of the small inner areas by leveraging the “integrated exploitation” of local resources. The rural landscape is considered to be capable of playing an essential role in many fields: ecology, production, culture and tourism. In this regard, guidelines are set by the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, the EU guidelines and the experience from Italy’s Rural Development Plans, the latter of which aim at achieving the much sought-after multi-functionality of agriculture. This study has been conducted in our particular moment in history, when new attention is being drawn to the potential of rural landscape due to its fragility, the crisis of traditional production systems and the changes caused by urbanization, which have had irreversible effects on 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.