Raising awareness of the cultural, architectural, and perceptive values of historic gardens and related landscapes: panoramic cones and multi-temporal data

Abstract

Historic gardens and their related landscapes are often experienced only for their social, aesthetic, and environmental resources, yet their cultural, architectural, and perceptive significance is often ignored. The paper demonstrates how historic and educational values of historic gardens and related landscapes can be revealed by combining historic maps, reading perspective cones, and also applying advanced digital and educational methods and techniques. Historical maps, especially military and cadastral maps, associated with historical iconography, can provide us with a lot of information to study historical gardens and also to define conservation and valorization plans that are related to the history of the site: geomatics tools to georeference and co-relate metric and non-metric historical maps provide growing useful outputs, that can be deployed through the use of Virtual Hubs, boosting the availability of content and the accessibility of open data for policy makers, experts, and non-expert members. Moreover, they can also support heritage education programs providing the opportunity to allow to understand the wealth of sites now simplified, in their system, with different functions and with a transformed context. The study of historic gardens involves the analysis of the landscape in its dynamism and complexity, defines tools that make users more aware of the richness of our heritage.