Le reti per la reinvenzione del passato. Il caso del Cammino di Santa Barbara (Sardegna, Italia)

There is a future to manage, but a past to restore and make safe. These are the bases on which governance should operate, taking care of future values and perspectives to transform territorial fragility into opportunities also through the creativity of the community, which can be considered the engine for the reinvention of places and contexts. As a matter of fact, "resilience" has progressively become a fundamental reference for driving innovation in policies and strategies for the regeneration and sustainable re-invention of the territory. This is the case of the Santa Barbara mining walk in Sardinia, the result of bottom up initiatives, which reinvents the past through the network of ancient mining tracks in the Sulcis Iglesiente region, in a vast and complex abandoned mining basin. Here, the significant heritage of industrial archeology and infrastructures characterizes this landscape, making it unique also for its vulnerability. However, recent literature highlights how the re-invention of the past cannot take place exclusively through a model of heritage redevelopment based on the punctual conversion of uses, as the mine-museum model but, rather, networking the different territorial contexts. The present research work highlights opportunities to re-invent territories through models based on networks, tangible and intangible. Within this framework, the Santa Barbara walk constitutes an interesting case study as it is in line with the sustainability principles and objectives, important to re-invent the past, and as it is a part of a fragile abandoned mining context. Moreover, the authors prove the growing key role of the smart community related to the Santa Barbara walk and its former mining context, to reinvent places and a sense of community through new technologies and social media, without excluding the pleasure of discovery. In fact, the significant mining connotation contributes to shape a landscape in progress: collapses and a massive re-naturalization confer fragility, mutability and attractivity to the context, increasing individual and collective curiosity, fundamental for the re-invention.