Topics from Cultural Goods to Cultural Heritage and Its Implications Regarding Theoretical Reflection and Region-Specific Italian Policies

This chapter analyses the reasons and effects of the semantic shift from the concept of cultural goods, which for a century has characterized Italian theoretical debate and sectoral policies, to that of cultural heritage. The introduction of this new category, codified in Italian legislation at the beginning of this century, has changed the criteria for selecting the objects and activities to be preserved (adding the identity criterion to the purely aesthetic one) and transforming an atomistic vision of “goods” in a holistic view of “heritage” as a set of contextualised and interrelated goods. The terminological shift has, thus, had significant effects both on legislation and sectoral policies and on the interdisciplinary theoretical debate opening new horizons and new meanings to the categories of heritage, preservation and enhancement. To understand the reasons for this shift and its effects, we have analysed the articles published since the end of the last century in the quarterly journal Economia della cultura, which has represented one of the reference points of the Italian and European debate on cultural economics. The analysis is based on textual mining techniques that aim to explore the relationship between the different words using the word cloud representation and specific statistical tools such as the bi-grams.