Digital Documentation. Villa Borghese

The knowledge of historical and architectural heritage is today reinforced by the growing use of digital instruments serving the purpose of documenting and disseminating data. The development techniques to build 3D models made them pivotal elements in popularizing information on objects on the scale of architectonic structures. Digital archives supplement 3D models with heterogeneous data (2D models, images, texts, video materials, bibliographical documents) with the purpose to preserve, evaluate and popularize cultural heritage (CH) by devising an open system of knowledge. This study puts forward a critical operative method and some guidelines to record, construct, manage, visualize and navigate 3D models with a view to achieving a full comprehension of the architecture in their own context, permitting to discover their inter-relationships through a digital archive.