Within the ongoing international debate on methods and tools that might help include the built heritage as strategic target within the policies for NZE buildings, the paper develops a methodological framework for performance assessment and control of historic buildings and districts in coastal and sub-coastal towns of South Italy, as specific geocluster of Mediterranean traditional architectures. In detail, based on the environmental, architectural and constructional investigation at different scales, the definition of some building-types is proposed, as descriptive models that might support the identification of energy deficits, building pathologies, inherent bioclimatic qualities and historical-architectural values, as well as the selection of effective and compatible intervention strategies within scenarios of integrated building refurbishment and urban regeneration of homogeneous areas. The application to two representative case studies details the operation phases and the achievable results toward the validation of the general methodology. Particularly, the study highlights how the energy improvement of the built heritage should focus on innovative products and solutions (e.g. aerogel, PCMs,.) that might guarantee the challenging and desirable balance between improvement of performances of building systems and safeguard of formal and material original features, as a compromise between prescriptive accomplishment and acritical exception of the normative standards. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.