Digital Tools for the Knowledge and Safeguard of Historical Heritage

In last years, the Italian historical heritage revealed its high fragility due to relevant events caused both by natural phenomena and by lack of maintenance. The suffered damages highlighted the need to act to prevent and/or control degradation and mitigate the effects of endogenous and external hazards. The increased need of safeguarding the historical heritage and the advances in digital technologies applied to cultural heritage pushed towards novel conservation and risk mitigation procedures, such as proactive conservation plans. These plans may take advantage of novel digital tools for the survey, diagnosis, conservation and monitoring associated to a digital twin of the construction and of its relevant structural and non-structural components. These tools are able to manage and deploy a digital knowledge of the buildings conditions, both conservative and structural, and thus drive maintenance and restoration process with the aim of increasing the resilience of historical heritage. In the paper, a prototypal digital model of historical architectural and artistic assets is illustrated to discuss the maturity of the approach and the aspects still open. The testing covers both structural and artistic components from a conservation and seismic viewpoint. A cost-benefit analysis is proposed in order to point out perspectives of the novel technologies and the opportunities of integration between static data coming from the geometry, history (construction sequences and technology) and dynamic data resulting from monitoring systems envisaged as an additional support to operators having in charge the conservation and safety of historical constructions.