Torri Medievali

In the XX century, after being forgotten for centuries, a series of archaeological excavations have brought to light the settlement, named “Montecastrese”, a system of Medieval fortifications organized on the top of a hill near the town of Camaiore, on the Tirreno sea, placed at the borders of the Lucca Province. The archaeologists brought back to light the traces of the fortress and of the village, exploring the monumental ruins of the northern tower, still in place and tumbled down in two main large parts. In the first half of the XIII century, the castle of Montecastrese was conquered and destroyed by the army of Lucca. At the time of its major development the small fortress was organized around two main towers, with walls and various houses. A quite extended village was placed on the southern side of the hill. In 2015 a new survey campaign brought contemporary technologies between these ruins. The municipality of Camaiore commissioned a complete digital survey to the Dipartimento di Architettura in Florence. The general survey plan has seen the use of aerial photogrammetric survey, 3D laser scanner survey and terrestrial photogrammetry. The large amount and the high quality of data allowed the definition of a perfect base to start studying and investigate the site to operate a digital reconstruction. The use of 3D modeling of all the lost parts, from the houses to the defense walls, to the system of towers was one of the focal point in this work, using the modeling process from the survey and supporting the reconstruction hypothesis with previous archaeological data, while matching the missing parts with similar architectures and the needs of the medieval defense/attack technics. For the northern tower a specific operation based on the use of 3D printed models was brought on to bring to an end the debate about the sequence of the fall of the tower, quite important to the digital reconstruction of this building, the direct manipulation of a scaled model turned out to be a fundamental step for the completion of this part of the research.

Relevance for the conference:
We bring a complete data processing, from digital survey to digital reconstruction, to the integration with the state of knowledge about the site and create a “final” version of the whole settlement for research and dissemination purposes.

Relevance for the session:
A case study were the authors themselves have followed all the operations, from the survey, to the data processing to a very specific use of 3D printing to allow reconstruction hypothesis.

Innovation:
Specific use of 3D printing for understanding and reconstruction, a selection of results are aimed to public presentation in the local museum rooms (using graphic and 3D physical models).

References:
GATTIGLIA, G. / ANICHINI, F. (2009): La Versilia nel Medioevo. Ricerche archeologiche in un’area buia della Toscana settentrionale, Atti del V Congresso Nazionale di Archeologia Medievale Foggia-Manfredonia 30.09-03.10 2009, Firenze 2009
GATTIGLIA, G. / TARANTINO, G. (2013):…loco ubi dicitur castello. Montecastrese e l’incastellamento in Versilia, in Archeologia Medievale XL