Industrial landscape Evolution in the Devil's Valley

The evolution of the specific characteristics of the landscape in the context under investigation, is as in other areas, strongly influenced by industrial development. In the Devil’s Valley, located in the upper Val di Cecina, with the activation of the borax industry first, and later with the transformation of geothermal resources into electricity and district heating, the original landscape, consolidated and resulting from human transformations related mainly to agro-forestry pastoral activities has undergone a sudden upheaval. The natural presence of the ‘Lagoni’ and the ‘soffioni’ has been overlapped, with greater intensity since the early ‘800, a new economy in the landscape, through the stratification of the complex of establishments, machinery and equipment in relation to the development of different industrial activities. In recent decades, with the establishment of the imposing Enel power plant, the cooling towers, the characteristic system of the imposing steam pipes that wind in the most varied planimetric and altimetric conformations marks in a very particular way the compositional matrices of the territory. The present contribution aims to document the first results of a wider research on the evolution of the landscape in the Devil’s Valley.