Digital Archives and Study of Historical Towns

The basic aim of this work is to create a multimedia data-base (an electronic-graphical system containing dimensional, qualitative and graphical data) and to make data available on the Internet as their representation evolves.. The theme of the work is thus on the one hand the study of harbour towns and the identification of the system of historical architectures that represented the physical place that connected historical town and harbour area, and on the other the survey of the structures and services that link the sea to the town and the hinterland. The study documents the type of harbour (shaped by geographical constraints), its distinctive architectural features, and the mode of expansion of the town in relation to this water-covered area, which cannot be landscaped in the same way as dry land. The outcome of the analysis has been the identification with an interesting range of architectural events related to the individual town-harbour apparatuses. 1. GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT Ever since the industrial revolution, harbour towns have undergone radical tranformations of their waterfronts and technical facilities, eventually resulting in a fracture between city and harbour and consequently between city and water. Thus cut off, many of these areas, which still bear important traces of the past and of a once viable relationship between harbour and town, experienced a slow decline. The waterfronts of historical towns have changed as a result of construction alterations. With time, such changes became barriers against the city itself; as water areas were gradually filled up and built, the interface between land and sea was redesigned and the various functions that harbour towns exerted over time (refuge, maritime city, merchant town, free port) became to all effects lost *. This project addresses the reconstruction, by way of their study and cataloguing, of the more significant harbour areas of the Adriatic to provide a common reading key through the analysis of the area and the specific study of the landscape and architecture of the individual districts. The main goal of the project is the creation of a database whose contents could be used for the revitalisation of the “water edges”, which have been acquiring a growing role in urban development and can also become useful instruments in programmes of environmental promotion and in the framework of initiatives of a more social nature. In particular, the project aims at identifying, studying and advancing proposals of architectural forms that suit better the new functions of harbour basins; these hinges of land-sea systems exist on different levels: that of the sea and the structures materially linked to it, that of the services that relate sea to town, and that of the harbour town with its historical buildings and architectures. * F. Pugnaloni, Premessa in F. Pugnaloni (ed) Orli d’acqua. Il disegno della costa e della città porto, Anniballi Grafiche, Ancona, Italy, 2002 figure 1 . Cultural heritage figure 2 . Natural geographical data of Adriatic coast 279 The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol. XXXIV, Part 5/W12