Scientific Area » Selection Criteria Series
Criterium Unesco II
Criteria for Which Registration is Proposed
To exhibit an important interchange of human values,
over a span of time or within a cultural area of the world,
on developments in architecture and technology,
as well as in monumental arts, town-planning and landscape design
The serial property is of the utmost importance as an excellent model of the interchange of values, artistic and cultural expressions established by the historical and cultural group of the Longobards in the epoch-making transition phase between antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Among all the peoples, even nomad and semi-nomad peoples, who lived in the time frame considered (6th - 8th century A.D.), the Longobards stood out for their extraordinary capacity to disseminate their poignant cultural, artistic, political and religious expressions. They left their deep and permanent mark in Italy and then in the rest of Europe, not only on the subsequent Carolingian rule, but also on the following 1,000 years of European history.
The serial site bears the most significant testimony to the fundamental contribution the Longobards made to the forging of medieval culture. The series components represent the creative responses of the long integration and assimilation process the Longobards were involved in.
The series shows with extraordinary completeness:
- the excellent cultural synthesis the Longobards made between their traditional values and those of the peoples they encountered during their long journey, values belonging to the clasical civilization, to the Christian-Roman-Byzantine civilization which led to the development of a new and genuine civilization;
- the reception, the conservation, the upgrading and the dissemination of architectural, monumental and artistic form and content of the classical, Roman and Hellenistic cultures;
- the reception, the transformation and the processing of a number of contents and expressions of the Christian tradition, which the Longobards disseminated all over the world; in particular they deeply influenced the spread of the worship to St. Michael in Western Europe, which led to the construction of dedicated sanctuaries all over Europe, including the most famous, Mont Saint Michel on the borders with Brittany;
- the fundamental contribution the Longobards made to pilgrimage, which led in the Middle Ages to an intense interchange of values and the development of a sense of unity between different peoples.
The series testifies the importance of the cultural interchange the Longobards were involved in, underlining on the one hand the specificity of their culture in the Early Middle Ages and on the other hand the universality of their contribution to the formation of medieval Europe.
