Sustainable conservation in a monumental cemetery,

The 'Foce' monumental cemetery in Sanremo (Ligury, Italy), founded in 1838 and used until 1948, was central in a study that the Author carried out since January 2013: it is a site rich in stone artefacts and seriously deteriorated due to the absence of a plan for weed control and conservation, the lack of heirs and the marine environment. In this study, the attention is especially focused on the sustainable conservation: the paper describes the specific-drawn maintenance plan for the conservation of the site, it also underlines the importance of using products and techniques with a low environmental impact and finally, it briefly presents the possibilities of socio-economic sustainability of valorisation and management considering the cemetery characteristics. The design of maintenance plan is a key step in modern conservation that is more and more oriented to preventive restoration and continuous care techniques in spite of sporadic and extraordinary restoration interventions. In this work, a lot of effort has been put into the design of an inspection form that needs to be strongly efficient in saving time and economic resources and in the research of low impact activities of maintenance.