POMPEII: FROM MONITORING TO CONSERVATION CONSERVATION BECOMES INTERACTIVE WITH THE AID OF AN APP

An innovative solution has been found for the constant monitoring of the archaeological site of Pompeii to tackle its greatest challenge, the conservation of the ancient city which makes safeguarding it a collective mission.

Due to its size and fragility, the conservation of the ancient city of Pompeii requires a huge commitment: in this sense, the archaeological site can be compared to other “complex” sites with heritage spread over a vast area, such as Petra (Jordan) or Angkor (Cambodia). Unlike smaller monuments, such as a palace or a castle, where monitoring is fairly simple, information about the state of preservation represents a crucial problem for complex sites. The city of Pompeii, which was first excavated in 1748, currently comprises over a thousand houses buried in AD 79 by the eruption of Vesuvius and consists of 13,000 rooms of which only 5% have roofing that protects them from weathering.

This vast site cannot be managed with traditional instruments. For this reason, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, as a satellite institution of the Italian Ministry of Culture, has developed an app as part of the “Open Pompeii” digital ecosystem where all the data related to the state of preservation of the site – crucial for planning maintenance and restoration work – is gathered.

The web app, which can be accessed from laptops, tablets and smartphones, was developed together with the company Visivalab and the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of  Salerno. The app has drawn on other experiences which, while they may seem unrelated, have proved extremely illuminating, such as the monitoring of motorways, bridges and other infrastructure.

A multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, architects, restorers and engineers are currently involved in putting together a comprehensive map of all the structural elements and their state of preservation: floors, walls, ceilings, roofs, plaster, decorative elements, furnishings etc. The app also makes it possible to make an initial estimate of the costs involved to intervene where an urgent situation has been detected.

Moreover, the app, devised to monitor the site with constant updates, also enables all the Park’s staff – from security guards to the director – to interact to report critical issues. “Digital  technology helps us to make safeguarding the site a participatory and interactive process, so that we can link up ‘islands of knowledge’, in other words information known to someone who, for example, has spotted a potential problem such as the top of a wall covered by invasive vegetation, which did not get to the people responsible for intervention”, explain the technicians of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.

“Above all, the digital revolution means that we are all connected and that we can communicate with a degree of rapidity and complexity never previously witnessed in the history of humanity”, declared Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the Park Director.  “It entails many risks, for example for young people though for others as well, but it also has huge potential. Our app represents an attempt to optimise connectivity to improve our knowledge of the site and thus its protection. We are already testing to see how Artificial Intelligence can support us in this process. In the future, we expect to involve visitors as well, who will thus be able to become our partners in safeguarding the site.”

In order to tackle the many risks facing our heritage, planned maintenance is essential: this means intervening in situations affected by degradation or dilapidation before irreparable damage is done. “But in order to do this,” explains Professor Luigi Petti of the University of Salerno, co-developer of the innovative methodological approach, “it is  necessary to have a complete and updated picture of the  site. Without systematic and regular monitoring, there can be no effective maintenance, and maintenance is the key to success considering that each Euro spent on maintenance leads to savings of dozens of Euros in the coming decades. Over the next few years, it is expected that pro-active maintenance will become even more important in dealing with the increased risks provoked by climate change.”

In order to react flexibly to notifications on the Open Pompeii app, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii is entrusting part of the interventions required to external operators by means of a “framework agreement”: in other words, the scale of interventions to be carried out in the next few years will be established, but without pre-determining right from the start exactly where they will be conducted, since this will be decided on the basis of constant monitoring of Pompeii’s heritage.

The monitoring and maintenance project in the framework agreement is being financed through the Italian government’s Cohesion Fund for an overall sum of 12 million Euros.

“I would like to thank Alessandro Giuli, the Minister of Culture, and the ministerial offices for their crucial support of our innovative project which can also be extended to other contexts, assuming it works. We shall do everything possible to make sure that it does, because preserving the entire site of Pompeii, and I don’t just mean the great domus but also the tiniest shop or the humblest stable, is the greatest responsibility that we have towards future generations”, stated Zuchtriegel.

An article that explores this theme in more depth is available on the Park’s e-journal: https://pompeiisites.org/e-journal-degli-scavi-di-pompei/

 

ACTIVITIES CARRIED OUT BY THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL PARK OF POMPEII

Project Manager

Vincenzo Calvanese

Coordinator of the planning and director of the execution of the contract

Alessandra Zambrano

Work team

  • Arianna Spinosa
  • Stefania Giudice
  • Antonino Russo
  • Giuseppe Scarpati
  • Angelo Capasso
  • Maria Pia Amore
  • Jlenia Graziuso
  • Alessandro Russo

 

 

previous slide
next slide