Since the Paris Agreement, European member countries have been committed to mitigating climate change and adapting to its effects. Climate action planning allows cities to organize their approach. It is critical to ensure that investments in infrastructure and services have a low-carbon impact and consider likely climate change perspectives. The output of this process is the climate action plan (CAP): one or more documents where a city sets out its roadmap to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen climate resilience throughout the community. Many cities have already developed and published a Paris Agreement-compatible CAP. The quality and compliance of these plans will also influence the achievement of the goals of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 2015). Thus, cities are crucial players in global climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, and how they engage in climate policy is currently under debate. The paper is intended to support technological design, selecting good practices from the latest and most complete ones for climate mitigation and adaptation in urban settings. In particular, the paper focuses on public space and built environment regeneration actions that can tangibly contribute to the global climate resilience movement. Considering the operational difficulty that could arise in planning climate adaptation measures in historical urban contexts, the study critically analyzes current strategies in sedimented landscape realities of high cultural-historical value. The goal is to draw from them a cognitive and expeditious method of intervention that can be reiterated for similar contexts and is compatible with the consistency and value of urban and built heritage. The theme is timely and falls into Sustainable Development Goals No. 11 (sustainable cities and communities) and No. 13 (climate action). •The paper analyses the most recent studies and scientific papers on climate action plans.•Good practices for climate mitigation and adaptation in urban settings are critically investigated.•The study analyses current strategies in sedimented landscape realities of high historical and cultural value.•A toolkit is proposed that can be repurposed for similar contexts.