Historic rural landscape in highly transformed areas - Looking for cultural landscape in Kami Shiojiri

The paper analyses the rural landscape of Kami Shiojiri, a small village of Nagano prefecture located along the historic Hokkoku Kaido road. In its territory, laying partly on a plain land and partly on a mountain area, extremely strong changes have undergone. The plain land has been almost entirely "urbanized" while the mountain area abandoned. The main issue is to read the landscape transformations in the past 110 years in order to find landscape relics. This has been possible thanks to historic maps from 1888 and aerial photographs from 1948. All the data have been rasterized and processed with CAD software in order to draw land use digital maps and calculate land use distribution for each period. As main results the study produced land use maps for 1888, 1948 and 2001 situation. Out of their overlaying, then it has been possible to locate some areas where historic rural landscape managed to survive. The most valuable landscape relic has to be seen in a terraced field area where mulberry tree used to be grown until the first half of twentieth century in relation with the silkworm industry. Further considerations on historic rural landscape preservation are then made presenting two cases with conservation problems similar to Kami Shiojiri. In the Italian rural areas of Cinque Terre and Sorrento terraced fields have been preserved thanks to particular projects targeting a sustainable economical development fully respectful of the historic rural landscape.