An Interdisciplinary Approach for Unveiling and Enhancing the First World War Heritage in the Landscape

More than one hundred years ago, the European landscape was profoundly transformed by multiple factors related to the Great War, which altered its territorial and environmental ecosystems, giving the landscape the value of a cultural asset with a civilizational value. After more than a century, the "signs of history" remain in the contemporary world at different levels of recognition, very often in a state of abandonment and at risk of loss. This contribution presents the elaboration of a non-invasive and "from remote" operative method, based on the analytical interpretation of historical cartography and historical aerial photographs to reconstruct the evolutionary dynamics of the landscape and recognize the areas where the impact of the conflict has been stronger. The georeferencing process of the sources in the QuantumGIS environment made it possible to elaborate interesting overlaps between cartographies and photographs belonging to different temporal frames. In this way, the dynamics of landscape transformation and land cover/use have been analyzed in relation to the destructive impact of the war to identify the areas in which it is more likely to find material remains of the vestiges, whose recognition becomes a prerequisite for the future practices of protection, transformation, and enhancement.