Masseria Cappelli in the Valle del Chiarino, L’Aquila. Refurbishment strategies and reuse models.

The complex of the buildings, proposed as a case study, located in the Valle del Chiarino, in Abruzzo, are part of an extensive territorial system of farms that the Cappelli, an emerging family of entrepreneurs in the livestock breeding sector, realize, between Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in their possessions that actually occupy all the grazing extensions of the south-west area of the Gran Sasso. The farm consists of three separate buildings called: the “casone" intended for storage, the mill, used for the production of oil obtained from the seeds of beech, and the small church of San Martino, all built between 1781 and 1899 . The close relationship that links the settlement of the farm to a territory with strong environmental and naturalistic values, is taken as a guiding criterion in the refurbishment project that chooses, as a new use, the ecomuseum that is configured as a new form of museum, which comes out of a closed place and regains the territory with which it re-establishes a bond. Depending on the different types of buildings and their state of conservation, the refurbishment project adopts different intervention strategies: in the "casone", which maintains its original volume and is destined to host services for welcome and hospitality of the ecomuseum, it chooses, according to the criterion "of the house in the house", the insertion of a wooden box that proposes its internal spatiality, functionally redefined, on the contrary, by freely arranged specialized blocks; in the mill, which houses the ecomuseum rooms and laboratories, it chooses, according to the criterion of addition, the creation of a volume which, placed above the pre-existing wall box, extends towards the river reachable by means of a treetop walkway, both characterized by use of corten. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how, in the refurbishment project, the objective of defining a suitable new use destination is connected to the definition of coherent operating strategies and compatible technical options.