The investigation of guidelines for a sustainable reuse of historic buildings can hardly describe the complexity of objectives and methodologies for the preservation of cultural heritage. Historic, aesthetic and cultural peculiarities of vernacular architectural heritage make it difficult to apply a bare quantitative approach to evaluate intervention sustainability, due to private/public nature of this heritage. This paper presents a multi-attribute model for the economic evaluation of sustainability in reuse projects concerning traditional housing buildings in Italian minor alpine settlements. The model uses relevant parameters for the appraisal of sustainability aggregated into three macro-indicators: intrinsic sustainability, context sustainability and economic-financial feasibility. The model has been calibrated by an expert panel and tested on a reuse hypothesis in Sauris, a settlement in North-Eastern Italy whose residential building type is characterized by spatial distribution and construction techniques, expressions of community traditions and local material resources availability.
