Le fasce in Liguria: dal dissesto al recupero verso nuove opportunità: l’etichetta geologica di prodotto (EGP)

This work deals with the role that terraced shelves have had and still have or could have in Liguria, for the region agricultural activities. Considered the oldest and most obvious form of anthropization of the territory to obtain fields to cultivate on slopes, these shelves, called FASCE, have gone through alternate events in the course of history. They have deeply marked the landscape with various crops, different cultivation techniques and the use of local resources. Thus, they have written the specific history and a particular culture of these places. In these pages, we will very generally tell their story placing them, as far as possible, in the broader context of the local communities that have built and rebuilt them, over the centuries, on the bases of an empirical technical knowledge. In recent years, the multiplicity of interdisciplinary studies on terraced areas has been motivated by the belief that these rural spaces represent an exemplary model for a multifunctional agriculture and an integrated and sustainable management of the territory. After numerous multidisciplinary studies on these FASCE, considering also the frequent hydro geological instability triggered by their abandonment, today particular attention is being paid to this great collective work, for an economic and social recovery of the terraced landscape. FASCE are considered rural areas where biodiversity has somehow been preserved and where it is still possible to activate healthier agriculture from many points of view. This is why this article proposes a further enhancement of the products grown in these terroirs / rural areas with the application, on a voluntary basis, of the geological product label (EGP) able to highlight the close link of the product with the territory and the environment that makes it certain and unique.