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The walls of Cartagena de Indias through methodological experimentation and survey systems protocols. Digital tools comparison for the study of the Antonelli’s defense systemCartagena de Indias, one of the main Spanish commercial ports in the Caribbean Sea, was strategically built on a system of islands and peninsulas that formed a lacustrine system along the coast of Tierra Firme, known today as Colombia. For several centuries, Cartagena fortifications have been at the fore-front of Spanish military technologies. This site became the scene of action of the main military engineers at the service of the Spanish crown. In 1586 Battista Antonelli received from King Philipe II the task to design this monumental defensive system. The first project for the Cartagena wall enclosure (1595) is due to Battista and it was continued and modified by his nephew Cristoforo Roda. Nowadays, Antonelli walls still fit into the urban fabric of the city and delineate the perimeter of the historic city. The research project follows the previous research experiments conducted by the Lab DAda-LAB of the University of Pavia in the territory of Panama for the study of the Antonelli fortifications systems of Portobello and San Lorenzo del Chagres. It concerned an extensive action aimed at the documentation and to the study of the entire fortified system of the historic center of Cartagena. The perimeter walls of the old city and the fort of San Felipe de Barajas have been documented through the use of a mobile laser scanner that uses SLAM technology, evaluating the most effective performed strategies for fast survey activities. In parallel, a more specific action was conducted on the portion of the Baluarte of Santa Catalina walls, where it was possible to give a comparison between different methods and instruments, in order to verify the reliability of the 3D databases. Analysis protocols have been developed for the documentation and study of the defensive system. The paper will highlight the construction technologies that qualify the fortresses of Cartagena de Indias and the results obtained by the comparison between different data acquisition technologies to evaluate the quality of the models for the development of documentation strategies for heritage enhancement and protection.

[EN] The analysis of the fortified routes in the city of Pavia (Italy) clarifies the adaptation of the medieval capital in the historical politics of the Mediterranean, where the evolution of the defensive system till the Spanish bastioned walls (sixteenth century) identifies the updating of the Lombard tradition to the practices of modern military architecture. Their defensive structures survive in the urban design of the contemporary city, in the configuration of infrastructures and urban aggregates, reflecting the consequences of the great processes of their dismantling (from 1905). The comparison between historical investigations and the current ruins, fragmented into disconnected portions between the historical bastions and the monumental gates, shows a picture of abandonment of the military structures that generates repeated collapses and emerging risk factors towards the surrounding densified urban context. The experimentation of military architectural approaches of documentation at the urban scale, developed by the research laboratory DAda Lab. of University of Pavia, defines an analysis process through the digital representation of the urban remains that is suitable for the preservation of the survived city walls and the enhancement of their fortified identity. The application of different 3D LiDAR systems for morphological acquisition promotes an integrated digitation process of scansets on the fortified system controlled at the urban metric scale: the experimentation applies the use of a mobile real time scanner for the digital tracking of historical routes, on which to implement the georeferencing of detailed static scanworlds, integrated in correspondence of Bastions and Monumental Gates. The optimization of architectural data density and the integration between data contribute to finalize a 3D territorial database predisposed to the architectural modelling of volumes and scenarios of structural instability of the military ruins, defining a virtual framework of widespread knowledge for the historical conservation and urban prevention of the fortified system