Rocky churches and religious cave sites on the Amalfi Coast: a thematic integrated representation with digital systems

As part of the historic built heritage of the Amalfi Coast – full of buildings and boroughs known for their typical architecture and landscape features – less known but, definitely, equally emblematic of the close relationship between nature and artifice, are the cave shrines. These are small buildings or natural caves that, from the ninth century, according to some, were used as places of worship by hermits in search of ascetic space. On the basis of a second and more reliable hypothesis, these buildings are considered as devotional places, or rural oratories. The present study, based on a careful survey census, analyzes the characteristics of these unusual architectural episodes. Through the identification of their structural peculiarities and reporting on their environmental relations it highlights so as these places of worship – although they are not showing a specific architectural character – make it possible to identify the signs of an old local building tradition that puts to its base the delicate link between architecture and landscape. An aspect, the latter, that all too often remains unexpected today, inevitably leading to environmental and social degradation.