ArcheoLogia Data 4/2024

This article explores the use of the Ferdinandeo-Leopoldino Cadastre to reconstruct the Apuan-Versilian (Stazzema, Italy) landscape in the first half of the 19th century. Through the creation of a Historical GIS, the research team from the MAPPA Lab at the University of Pisa vectorized the road network, buildings, and cadastre parcels, providing a foundation to analyse agrarian and settlement structures. The study area, located above 500 m asl in the Apuan Alps, reflects socio-economic dynamics of the period, highlighting changes due to political-economic strategies. The digitisation of the Ferdinandeo-Leopoldino Cadastre provides insights into property, land use, and agrarian structure. This work is part of a broader study aimed at analysing the processes of “abandonment” that have affected the Versilian slope of the Apuan Alps, at least since the post-World War II period. The vectorization of the Ferdinandeo-Leopoldino Cadastre provides a picture of the landscape in the first half of the 19th century, to be used not only as the oldest informational layer in the development of an Historic Landscape Characterisation but also as a tool to understand, in a diachronic perspective, the ongoing processes of renegotiation between humans and the environment that have led to the formation of the current landscape.