Family-owned Heritage Houses or Inhabited Monuments? A Peculiar Case of Living Heritage

In the current state of knowledge, this paper aims to propose the introduction into the lexicon of scientific literature of the expression “inhabited monument” with reference to those anthropised human sites in which the intended use of housing coexists with their status of a monument. At a macroscopic level, this research suggests a model that satisfies the requirements of buildings that are both permanently inhabited and recognised as cultural heritage. For this purpose, the case study of a UNESCO site in Southern Italy is presented: it was granted this recognition in 1996 due to the exceptional value of its inhabited houses, which were already declared as monuments at a national level in the early Twentieth-century: the “Trulli of Alberobello”.