Ricerc@Sapienza

The technological innovation constitutes a strong tool to deliver and manage information about Cultural Heritage. The Istituto superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro of MiBAC (IsCR, former ICR) has developed the system in more than 20 years to evaluate the risk of the architectural and archaeological goods. A collaboration among the IsCR, the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione (ICCD) and Sapienza University of Rome allowed to define a specific application of the system to study and monitoring the historical centres.
The use of the Risk Map foresees a countable description on different scales, which is adapted to the different levels corresponding to the whole historical centre, the related urban units, the building units and the urban spaces. Each one of these entities is the object of a special data-sheet that has the aim to describe the proper characteristics and to define the related conservation state through a direct analysis and the use of specific algorithms.
Among the possible tasks of this digital System that are: the georeferred census of the historical centres in the national territory; the definition of various levels of vulnerability, considered in a ‘cross’ way - among different settlements – and in an ‘inner’ way – among different aggregates in the same settlement; the identification of risk levels of the historical settlements, determined relating the levels of natural and anthropic dangerousness with the values of building vulnerability and considering the transformation degree of historical architectures; the monitoring of the conservation interventions on the existing urban buildings.
This paper deals with the opportunities to use the Risk Map specifically for small abandoned historical centres, looking at the urban reality existing in Latium and considering the different state of conservation of the settlements. It proposes different uses of the report models describing the historical centres in relation to the different condition of the sites considering the application of all or some of the six data-sheets defined for the historical centres and a new development of an existing report model already used for the archaeological sites.
Even if the system focuses the material aspects of the historical centre, considering in synthesis the social and economic factors conditioning the day life and the future destiny of the settlements, the formalization of the report model through an ontology allows the possible development and the interoperability of the system with other data-base or digital programs. In this way, other kinds of evaluation of conservation and valorisation issues of historical centre will be possible, opening a potential scenario for the transparent and not discretional managing, nearer to the complexity of the reality.