This paper aims to describe the design strategy adopted in Rome to support and enhance sustainable mobility. It is a strategy aimed at promoting new green infrastructures for urban accessibility, daily sports practice and social inclusion in a historic city, stratified and not very inclined to change. Therefore, the dissemination of this experience is useful for planning a sustainable future for heritage cities that ensures an appropriate and equitable balance between conservation and development. Sustainable mobility is now considered one of the most important challenges for metropolitan areas and large conurbations. In these terms, Rome is a weak city. The city’s great bicycle ring route (GRAB), an integral part of the Extraordinary Tourism Mobility Plan 2017-22, is a key infrastructure for increasing more sustainable and healthier modes of travel, even on a local scale. The GRAB project, whose complex infrastructure provides multiple services, differs from a simple cycle path network. Its complexity refers to an ability to attract different types of users in different types of urban contexts—historical settings, monuments, newer neighborhoods and areas of contemporary urbanization. The project results can be measured first in relation to its progress (already funded, in the executive planning phase, with the approval of the first construction sites expected by 2022). A second important result is the participation of institutional bodies and citizens’ associations, which will oversee the construction and maintenance work as well as infuse into the project a constant vitality, in a true civic ecology perspective. Third, the results are important for enhancing metropolitan area accessibility and the environmental and social re-activation of the areas crossed, achieved directly and through the project’s realization. The GRAB strategy belongs to the new generation of landscape projects that have radically changed the priorities and hierarchies of intervention in the contexts of contemporary urbanization. These projects are based on the ecological analysis of the context but are located close to the fluctuating dynamics of contemporary metropolises and the problems of exclusion and marginality—both spatial and social—linked to the very rapid ecological, economic and demographic transformations.

More and more wild animals find refuge in cities, due to the growth of urbanized areas, the devastation of natural habitats and the intensive transformation of agricultural spaces. The presence of wildlife increases conflicts but is also generating interesting considerations on the relationship between man and nature, based on empathy and the comprehension of animal. New co-evolution paths within cities, anthropic habitat par excellence, imply a different way of relating to the "wild" or "feral" to produce generative alliances and new shared habitat. The landscape project must come out of the comfort zone of a design conceived exclusively for human consumption and well-being: spaces of interspecies co-operation (productive symbiosis), generating responses of mutual adaptation to environmental and climatic changes; new places of co-habitat for both humans and animals; immersive spaces, for empathic and emotional cognition capable to sensitizing became aware of the interconnections between all living species and their common habitat.

Italy is one of the European countries most affected by wildfires and landslides.To date, the research on wildfires is mainly addressed to evaluate best solutions for prevention, control, and mitigation. Nevertheless, not enough attention was given so far to study effects of wildfires in view of the analysis of the related geohazards.In urban environments, the cascading effect of wildfires on landslides represents a clear example of multi-hazard. In this regard, wildfires can be regarded as a preparatory process for landslides triggering, as they significantly modify the local conditions of slopes for a not negligible time window.In the FIRE (wildFire-related-landslide scenarIos for territorial planning and Risk managemEnt) project, funded by “Sapienza” University of Rome, a multidisciplinary research team experienced, since 2022, an innovative approach to derive quantitative scenarios of expected shallow landslides over burned areas, by evaluating the effectiveness of wildfires in preparing instabilities, also in view of defining best practices for fire extinguishing and land management plans with respect to the potential damage caused by fires at short- and long-term.Two case studies have been selected in Italy: Mt. Epomeo at Ischia Island (Naples) and Camaldoli hill (City of Naples). These two sites suffered in the last decades a large number of wildfires, and, in the case of Camaldoli hill, consequential shallow landslides.Since the project activity began, two severe wildfires struck Ischia and Camaldoli, on August 2023 and June 2024, respectively.The physical, hydraulic, and mechanical properties of soil covers potentially unstable have been defined through field surveying, in situ determinations and laboratory geotechnical tests, performed on unburned and burned samples as well as in different seasons, from May 2023 to June 2024.For the Ischia case study, simulations of multiple wildfire propagation scenarios were carried out, originating from the most probable ignition points. These scenarios incorporated spatially explicit fuel load distributions and seasonally varying meteorological conditions. The simulations were executed using a computational model rigorously calibrated with empirical data from the 2023 Ischia wildfire, ensuring scenario-specific precision. To further support the modelling of risk scenarios, a close survey of vegetation was conducted and then critically compared to data derived from official thematic cartography and the most recent systematic botanical studies available. This enabled an updated and detailed understanding of the identification and distribution of dominant plant species composing the habitats within the Ischian landscape system, whose dedicated documentary study on the morphology and development of root systems allowed for the construction of root profiles to be associated with the recognised plant communities.Finally, after a specific parametrisation of the physical and mechanical properties of the burned and unburned soil covers characterised by different plant associations, for each scenario of wildfire propagation, the PARSIFAL approach was applied to obtain scenarios of shallow landslides by considering both rainfall and seismic triggers in a probabilistically-defined framework.The abovementioned activities are here reported, together with some preliminary results of the FIRE project while further steps will allow a statistically-based analysis through data-to-model informed Artificial Neural Networks.