This hierarchy does not always correspond to importance. In fact there are rivers that represent today a basic resource for history and culture of the places on which they flow and of a much wider area as well even if not much wide neither particularly rich of water. This is because they contain various and important anthropic traces due to their possibility to guarantee settling, communication, defence and surviving to the human being in past times. Furthermore, the same rivers are frequently characterized from a significant biodiversity from a naturalistic point. Therefore these rivers represent the link between all the elements placed and developed along them during centuries.
Though the same rivers are often hardly exploited and this contributes today to have a skin-deep knowledge of the archaeological, architectural, ethno-anthropological and naturalistic existing elements and to an increasing urbanization that could definitively delete these important traces of the human and natural heritage.
Activities of the project will be developed through a research programme that will include studies, cataloguing, terrestrial and aerial photographic surveys, issues, conferences to discuss the results, exhibitions and a web site that will permit access to a wide European public.

Kontakt: dr. Luca Di Giacomo
History and Preservation of the Architectural and Environmental Heritage
c/o Via Megara 430, 96011 Augusta (SR), Italy
T: +39 338 9948082
E-mail: lucadigiacomo@saphanos.org