Planned conservation and cultural enhancement strategy: UNESCO Vesuvius’s archaeological site management

Vesuvius’s district enshrines a disseminating stock of multi-shaped cultural significance, so much variously compromised and at risk nowadays as any conservation and enhancement policies cannot be separated from land reclamation and built heritage reconditioning. Hence, the Planned and Preventive Conservation has often looked like empty word rather than effective means, due to the widely spreading emergencies standing on this knotty context, being so far from the balanced state of conditions that the conservation planning could effectively start from. Thus, being based on integrated measures of heritage protection and proper use, linked together by the cultural perspective, any enhancement policies have rarely had ground, but the UNESCO archeological site because of its relevant management assets and features. The Hercolaneum Conservation Project (HCP, 2001-12) and the UNESCO archaeological site maintenance plan – recently inspected (2013) – constitute the research core-topics, whose both have been surveyed Planned Conservation approaches effectiveness and management, as well as the neighbouring enhancement strategies coordination to. Though the case-studies reveal deep different setting-outs and outputs on a multiple point of view, by comparing each other the so-revealed dialectic opposition well highlight this puzzling picture, letting emerge, on a hand, a progressing example, even a “miraculous” one, and on the other hand, a paradigmatic set of missed methodological and management tools and approaches. By the end, it cannot be neglected the very relevant HCP management asset establishing on a public-private partnership, collaborating with an abroad institute too