From Digital Survey to a Virtual Tale: Virtual Reconstruction of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan

Nowadays, the innovative learning methods, such serious games, have become the new frontier of education and communication; in architecture, the virtual reconstructions of historical sites in their current state, in their original appearance and in their evolution over the centuries have contributed to the development of digital technologies (such as digital survey, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality). This chapter describes the potentialities of new digitization technologies as tools to communicate and disseminate Cultural Heritage (CH) starting from its digital survey and a scientific research of historical sources. This research finds a new way to effectively tell the history of a monument and to transmit its value as a witness of ages that no longer belong to us, bringing it virtually to life. Specifically, the research group focused on the test of a digital workflow of surveying and modelling of some rooms of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, that contain wonderful witnesses of Italian Renaissance characterized by a troubled history.