Guidelines for the Maintenance Plan of the Archaeological Heritage: the case-study of Villa di Poppea, Oplontis.

In recent years, the issue of maintenance has left the technical and operational field and has assumed programming, strategic and organizational perspectives. Practices in design of Maintenance Plans just since a few decades have found new impulses, also due to laws which have introduced mandatory scheduling of maintenance activities even for Cultural Heritage. The result of this trend is the overcoming of traditional categories of ordinary and extraordinary maintenance. Therefore, the maintenance is understood as a continuous process in time to ensure the conservation of the built environment. This approach has not always found implementation through suitable tools with the variety and the complexity of Cultural Heritage. In the case of the Archaeological Heritage, the loss of material, due to the decay, is dangerous because it decreases the witness value of the asset. The Archaeological Heritage prevents the use of standardized tools to determine the frequency and the ways of inspections and interventions. Therefore, it is fundamental the critical rethinking of the strategies of maintenance and management under the system of intrinsic characteristics and values witnessed by ancient contexts. [1] The paper develops a procedure for drawing up Maintenance Plans dedicated to Archaeological Heritage. This procedure, tested on case-study Villa di Poppea in Oplonti (Torre Annunziata - Naples), aims to predict maintenance actions, with different intensity and frequency, in order to control the effects of decay agents. In the case of Archaeological Heritage, the implementation of maintenance plans is strategic, in order to prevent the severe loss of the materials and to preserve the values of authenticity and identity of the site.