The Gran Sasso imagined in archive documents, unrealized tourist and sports projects for the highest mountain of the Appennines

The State Archives of L’Aquila preserve within little-explored fonds projects, plans and pro-grammes concerning mountain contexts of high naturalistic value, traces of which can be found in archive drawings, from which emerge the ambitions of a bygone, albeit close, time. Significant among many of these unrealised plans is the 1964 Gran Sasso d’Italia Tourist and Sports Enhancement Plan, a mountain that hosts the highest peak in the Apennines. As early as 1934, its tourist vocation was determined with the construction of the first cableway in central-southern Italy on its southern side, rising up the valley of L’Aquila and culminating in a hotel at 2130 metres above sea level. However, it was not until the 1960s that the site was the subject of extensive tourism planning based on a project by architect Luigi Orestano, which spread over the 26 km of carriageable road connecting the cable car stations, providing accommodations up to 10.000 people, numerous sports facilities and the construction of 35 ski lifts. Very few works were completed, some of which are now in a state of disrepair. The archive drawings reveal a territorial surreality that would have radically changed the way of living and inhabiting the territory. The wealth of content and graphic designs, identified and filed, has given rise to a database in which ‘digital objects’, endowed with attributes and geolocated, return a heritage that is often unrealised1, but essential for understanding territorial developments and the social dynamics of places. Of this ‘heritage’, the present study focuses exclusively on unrealised works.