Agricultural terraced landscapes in the Province of Trieste (Northeastern Italy)

Terraced agricultural areas represent a beautiful but problematic landscape, because their current maintenance involves great diseconomies. However the recent agricultural European policy, more careful to the environmental problems, could mean several new opportunities for this kind of rural settlement. This paper analyzes the evolution of the terraced landscapes in the Province of Trieste (North-eastern Italy) in the 1955-2000 periods. So, we studied the recent development of agriculture for this territory and the local traditional agricultural terraced settlement, here generally called pastini. In order to locate and estimate the size of terraced areas, we applied a GIS overlaying analysis, using an official European cartography, MOLAND, and a digital elevation model (DEM). MOLAND (Monitoring Land Use / Cover Dynamics) is a research project supported by the European Commission, giving as result several land-cover maps at medium spatial resolution (scale 1:25,000). Considering slope parameters, we estimated the recent development of terraced areas, identifying wider settled hill zones in Trieste Province. Finally, we briefly described three rural areas well-characterized by a stepped appearance landscape.