Playing On Our Heartstrings. A journey among Ravello’s hidden treasures: Art, nature and man’s work (October 2013- April 2014)

Heartstrings Festival: concerts, walking tours, workshops, meetings, pottery courses and a great sport event at the end of March

The central theme of a six-month-long journey - where the venues of the 20 scheduled concerts are unusual cultural and natural places spotted in the outstanding landscape where Ravello has the chance to lie - is represented by the delicate sound of a guitar, the musical instrument which better fits with the intimacy of the places proposed to the visit.
It’s like a long walk - literally speaking, since walking tours in the nearby of Ravello are foreseen in addition to concerts - accompanied on a guitar to let visitors discover the deepest connections of the locations with the local traditions.
But such a sequence of events and initiatives will be an end in itself without the highlighting of the most peculiar element of the Amalfi Coast “cultural landscape”: that is the hard, centuries-old work of its inhabitants to adapt difficult topographic conditions to survival necessities. Pic-nic in the nearby of the terraced gardens with homemade products, as well as workshops on maintenance and protection of the “macere” (dry stone walls) will be offered to participants. Along the hiking trails, after tasting the shepherds cheese, tourists will get acquainted with “fascine and palizzate” (traditional techniques for the soil reinforcement), examples of what is nowadays called “naturalistic engineering”, which have been part of local people’s know-how since centuries.
The core of the touristic offer of this project is the conscious discover of the “behind the curtain of Ravello”, which, to the eye of a careful tourist, will result more wide-ranging and interesting than the one usually proposed on the tourist market.
Playing on our heartstrings, this is the aim of the project, in a journey among the most authentic Ravello treasures: art, nature and, above all, man’s work.

The project is promoted by the Environment and Agriculture Department of Ravello Municipality in collaboration with the Soprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici e Paesaggistici di Salerno, with the scientific direction of the European University Centre for Cultural Heritage and funded in the frame of PO FESR ob. 1.9 by Regione Campania.