Sustainable Rehabilitation Processes for Old Rural Manufactures: Ecological and Digital Transition for the Etna palmenti System

The contribution intends to highlight the historical and cultural specificities of the Etnean territory, which has constituted a research laboratory of extraordinary interest. The widespread cultural heritage of palmenti and agricultural annexes is substantiated by splendid examples of rural architecture with multiple aggregative, technological, and functional compositions. It is a homogeneous heritage linked to a well-defined rural economy that reinforces the material culture of aspects linked to social identity. Critical issues are the abandonment and encroachment that occurred with the expansion of Etna’s piedmont centers. The research aimed to define the “consistency” of the heritage, interpreted here not only as high diffusion but as resilience of activities and identification for compatible and complementary reuses, for a sustainable housing impact. This housing-productive system constitutes a widespread heritage—material and immaterial—based on non-intensive forms of sustainable agriculture, already open to more efficient and low-environmental-impact agroecological solutions. The methodology identified the Etna rural system as an opportunity for census, cataloguing, and classification according to qualitative criteria—morphological and technological—leading to appropriate interventions for the rural heritage under examination. Among the research strategies are the intervention on the waste chain that, by incentivizing recycling processes of the agricultural waste itself, renews old good practices that are no longer in use, the inclusion of digital archives of documentation that, in the wake of the “digital transition,” return sociocultural, didactic, and tourist benefits.