TOWARDS UNESCO RECOGNITION

Our zone’s project to apply to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site began in 2008, with the Consortium for the Safeguarding of Conegliano Valdobbiadene Wines leading the way. The objective is to highlight the qualities of an extraordinary viticultural landscape in which the hillsides have, over the course of the centuries, been covered in a patchwork of vineyards by man, who has thus preserved the environment whilst creating a real cultural landscape. Here, even today, wine is “hand-crafted”. Vine-growing in this area has succeeded perfectly in integrating itself and developing in line with the distinctive geographical, physical and climatic features of the countryside, bringing about a sort of co-evolution between the activities of man and the territory.

 

These hills in fact represent the central factor in the candidacy project to become a UNESCO Heritage Site.

 

The area possesses three elements that correspond to the requirements for insertion in UNESCO’s list of Heritage Sites:

• the presence of a civilisation and material culture that is still very much alive, linked to the cultivation of the vine, an activity that dates back locally over more than 1,000 years;
• the significant interaction between man and a particularly fragile natural environment, which has allowed for the preservation of a unique and remarkably intact landscape;
• the link between these hills and the works of artists of indisputable worth, such as Bellini and Cima da Conegliano, leading Masters of the Italian Renaissance.

 

Thanks to the unity of the entire area, its institutions, the vine-growers and private citizens, the candidacy has progressed with record speed. At the end of 2010, in fact, the zone’s official insertion in the tentative list for Italy of potential UNESCO World Heritage Sites was made public.