Ampliamento della fruizione culturale dei siti naturalistici in Sicilia Orientale

This work, after widely discussing the meaning of the words “landscape” and “geocultural site”, analyses the touristic potentials of Sicilian naturalistic sites and the instruments to protect them. Moreover, it ranks and orders the rich but chaotic web-collected data about the 37 nature reserves of eastern Sicily in a systematic way.The 5 “case studies” aim at filling a cultural deficit, as it appears impossible to find any geological information about some sites well-known to tourists, neither on-site nor in the most popular travel guides. Indeed, that kind of information would be extremely important in order to give a defined naturalistic and touristic identity to those sites.This work provides such geological information in a way that helps non-specialised readers understand it, integrating it with historical data and cultural curiosities, which can lead to a first level of knowledge. However, it will be more detailed than what can be found in regional naturalistic guides.The sites have been chosen both because they’re easily accessible, and because they can be considered to all effects “geocultural sites”, as they present geological peculiarities but are, at the same time, marked by important manmade works that characterise their landscape, their history, and therefore, their “geography”.