“Rural villages” as engines of territory sustainable growth

The paper focuses on the project, presenting some specific cultural goods (material and immaterial) as drivers for the sustainable growth of underdeveloped rural areas, factors of production and competitiveness and tools for introducing innovative social and environmental solutions. The project involves the realization of a touristic-cultural route that virtually and physically connects the rural villages realized in the 1940s by the Italian totalitarian regime, following the policy of colonization of the latifundium in the southern Italy. These rural villages constitute not only the evidence of an architectonic and technological age, but also the 20th century peasant civilization. The aim of the project is to go far beyond conservation, restoration, physical rehabilitation or re-use of such villages, and to demonstrate how cultural heritage is a powerful economic, social and environmental catalyst for regeneration, sustainable development, economic growth and improvement of the well-being of people and places. This project is a model of sustainable development that can be replicated with appropriate contextualization in other similar territorial environments in other parts of Italy as well as in European countries such as Portugal and Spain that have adopted between the 1930s and the 1950s the same agricultural policies.