Valuation of the vocationality of cultural heritage: The Vesuvian villas

Abstract

The Vesuvian Villas are a system of architectural assets that, due to important artistic, historical and typological characteristics, have relevance that is not only local. However, due to ineffective management policies and insufficient financial resources, the system of the Vesuvian Villas is subject to abandonment or to invasive transformations for speculative purposes. The management policies for these real estate goods would require a profound theoretical and operational review that, together with the overcoming of the binding instrument as the only guarantee of protection, pursues conservation through synergies founded on appropriate uses of the Vesuvian Villas. This innovative path is difficult to implement due to the substantial rigidity of the architectural structures and the transformations aimed at renewing the forms of use, but mostly for the lack of available financial resources. Starting from the analysis of the relationships between conservation and transformation of the historical architectural asset, the paper proposes a multicriteria analysis model for the evaluation of the "vocational" nature of the "Villa Vesuviana" property, aimed to its conservative reuse. This suitability was assessed starting from a set of indicators explaining the actual state of the building (typological, morphological, structural and artistic characteristics) and its location. The indicators have been evaluated through qualitative judgments made using the hierarchical analysis technique. Particular attention was paid to the evaluation of synergies deriving from complementary uses.