Virtualizing ancient Imperial Rome: from Gismondi's physical model to a new virtual reality application

This paper deals with two, related topics: the acquisition and recovery of information 'trapped' in the geometry of an historical artifact; the employment of this form of 'intangible heritage' as an historical source on a par with more explicit sources such as ancient drawings, books, archaeological excavations, etc. This study relates to the construction of a virtual model of ancient Rome within the framework of the international project known as "Rome Reborn 1.0" (www.romereborn.virginia.edu). It exploits intangible information in order to make a plausible reconstruction of ancient Rome, currently one of the largest virtual models ever developed in the field of cultural heritage.