The Institute of Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este, with the patronage of the Italian National Commission for UNESCO and the collaboration of the Municipality of Tivoli, will gather on February 13, 2025, in a forum at the Sanctuary of Ercole Vincitore, the testimonies of all the territories of transhumance through the voices of the Institutions, the mayors of the Municipalities of Abruzzo and Lazio, the presidents of the National and Regional Parks, but also through the professions in the public and private sector whose mission is the protection and enhancement of cultural and landscape heritage.
Since the summer of 2024, by will of the Institute of Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este, the Sanctuary of Ercole Vincitore with Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este is also a Literary Park dedicated to Marguerite Yourcenar, Ludovico Ariosto, Ignatius of Loyola. The meeting on February 13th will see the participation of the representatives of the Literary Parks near the Sanctuary of Ercole Vincitore (Ovidio, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Ignazio Silone, Benedetto Croce) and the president of the Association, Stanislao de Marsanich, who have the task of transmitting the link between literature and the environment, also understood as a place of inspiration, thus completing the deepest meaning of transhumance as an Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
Recognized by UNESCO, transhumance could not have found a better stage than the Sanctuary of Ercole Vincitore, perhaps the largest of the sacred complexes of Roman architecture from the Republican era, built on a terrace overlooking the Aniene river, along an ancient transhumance route that would later become the Via Tiburtina.
From Ercole to San Michele, the cults linked to transhumance are evidenced by a widespread presence of temples and sanctuaries along the sheep tracks. The economic traffic generated at this important crossroads was essential for all the populations of central and southern Italy. Due to its strategic position, the ancient city of Tivoli was identified precisely with the cult of Hercules (Herculaneum Tibur) and venerated him both as a warrior god and as a protector of trade and flocks, the cornerstone of the Tiburtine economy for many centuries.
But what is transhumance? “For many, it evokes the poetic narration of imaginative settings, inspired by the words of the Abruzzo poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, and who in several passages evoked this periodic coming and going of flocks along the greenways. But transhumance was one of the cornerstones of a herd economy that made the fortune of an entire, vast, territory stretching between Lazio, Abruzzo, Molise, Campania and Puglia”, explains Nunzio Marcelli, President of APPIA Rete Pastorizia Italiana and founder of the Cooperativa Asca.
“We strongly wanted this day – concludes the director of the Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este Institute, Andrea Bruciati – aimed at enhancing the sheep tracks and more generally many signs, both material and immaterial, of the culture of transhumance, which has always been a field of convergent interest for numerous scholars, even from different disciplinary backgrounds, as demonstrated by countless research and publications. Our Institute represents an extremely complex articulated system, fused with the landscape in which it insists and lives. We give great importance to the unique value system of these places that present environmental morphological characteristics and an incomparable anthropological stratification. Landscapes common to the civilization of transhumance can therefore be seen as a resource, to promote eco-sustainable development of the territory capable of strengthening its identity”.
