The Mesola historical centre

The project concerning the historical centre of Mesola, near Ferrara, has been developed to define guide-lines useful at the future conservative interventions on the whole historical centre and particularly on surfaces. The research followed these steps: historical research and comparison between historical picture and the present condition of the historical landscape; high definition photographic documentation; metric-morphologic survey (by means of direct, topographic and 3D laser scanner procedures); macroscopic analy-ses and colorimetric characterization. The 3D survey was performed in order to acquire all the metric-morphological data and the surfaces specifications useful to the con-servation and enhancement of the entire historical centre; the project is still in progress for what concern the definition of the guide-lines for the interventions on surfaces and the normative actions for conservation of physical integrity of historic urban landscape. The visual recognition of the different materials, of the surface specifications and of the states of conservation was integrated by pro-cessing the reflectance data (acquired by the “time of flight” 3D laser scanner as well as the metric data) and was followed by a more detailed analysis of the colorimetric data.The data acquired by means of these integrated procedures will be stored in a digital data base aimed at the periodical monitoring of surveyed areas and surfaces and progressive checking of the interventions of restoration.Digital archives allow making it easier to monitor deterioration processes and to plan restoration interventions. The described proce-dure can be extremely powerful in monitoring the architectural items and setting up interactive metric databases able to provide at any time information about the surveyed objects. The results obtained until now have shown that it is possible to organize data bases of a great variety and nevertheless complemen-tary to one another, so as to allow a global view of the conservative problem.