Catalysts of Cities and Culture. The religious buildings of the rural Gargano, between representation and conservation

Especially during the Middle Ages, the Gargano is a land of great religious complexes along the rugged paths of pilgrimace routes. Spiritual centers and crucibles of culture, but also political and social economic poles, these complexes have accompanied and influenced the development of the territory getting to propose as key attractors for urban development. Among the most emblematic cases are the Capuchin Convent in San Giovanni Rotondo, and the monastery of San Giovanni in Lama, now known as the Convent of San Matteo Apostolo, which allowed the birth and growth of the center of San Marco in Lamis. Respect to the few factories still active and in a good state of conservation, many are instead abandoned and reduced to ruins, with an incidence almost always proportional to the distance from population centers and traffic flows and communication. This paper tries to retrace the complex events of these factories, from their origins to today, using different ways of graphic representation as essential complement of minimal documentation archival and iconographic. The objective is not only the representation of monuments, cities and territories, captured in their definition and transformation processes, but also the proposed restoration projects of case studies that can be taken, for material consistency and state of conservation, as example able to activate interventions of protection for urban and regional scale.