Towering over Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Rome: 3D Mapping the City’s Network of Surveillance and Power

This project combines scholarly and computational methods to create a 3D map of late medieval and Renaissance Rome’s most prominent vertical features: the towers, bell towers, repurposed ruins, and hills that dominated the skyline. The raw data is derived from a handful of primary and secondary planimetric sources, as well as detailed panoramic views (by Posthumus, van Heemskerck, and van den Wyngaerde) from the mid-sixteenth century, which are then transposed to an original GIS map of the city. The ultimate goal is to explore the interconnectedness of sight and sound, topography, and movement in the city by analyzing acoustics, ballistics, and defensive systems.

Nicola Camerlenghi is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College (USA). While researching his PhD at Princeton he was a Kress Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana. Currently, he is Digital Humanities Fellow at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence. He is the author of a book (and associated website) on the Basilica of St. Paul in Rome and he is one of the lead researchers of the "Mapping Rome" collaborative based at University of Oregon, Stanford, and Dartmouth.

Please find the video registration of the event on our VIMEO CHANNEL: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/556244233
Scientific Organization: Elisabetta Scirocco