Valorization of key buildings of the rural traditional landscape in central Italy: the case of the “Casa Colonica”

Traditional farmhouses are landscape resources of great value as elements of identity that can "narrate" different space-time modality of land management and social organization. A meaningful objective is to merge the need of preservation of these historic buildings and the need to increase their energy efficiency. This paper is part of a broader research with this aim. The paper concerns the developing of a model showing the optimal solutions to insulate the roof of a typical vernacular building of central Italy called “Casa Colonica”. The model developed an energy simulation model integrated with a life-cycle costing approach and a life-cycle assessment approach. Furthermore, the first outputs of the model are combined using a multicriteria analysis aimed to rank the sustainability of the insulating materials. Ten insulating materials were tested and the resulting best materials are polyurethane, polystyrene foam, rock wool, glass wool, hemp and kenaf fibres thanks to their good energy and thermal performances and a good LCA performance. The worst materials is mineralized wood. In fact, while presenting a good LCC performance, this material has high costs in terms of human health, ecosystem quality, resources consumed, and a low efficiency as insulating materials, which is reflected in a high number of hour of discomfort and low CO2 avoided.