English Audio Request

Ladies and gentlemen, I am really honoured by the organization’s invitation to be here with you today at this Workshop on the theme of “Tangible and intangible cultural heritage: humanities, engineéering and architecture”
I’d like to share with you certain observations on the central theme of Cultural Heritage and, in particular, I’d like to present briefly an experience that my University, the Sapienza of Rome, has created to respond to the pressing questions that Heritage brings to the University.
I’m speaking about the master’s in “Digital Heritage. Cultural Communication through Digital Technologies”, which came into being in order to create a workshop capable of transforming the rich tradition of studies and capacities which the Faculties of Humanities give to their students in professional opportunities, thanks to the tools made available by digital technologies for communications and the positive exploitation of Cultural Heritage and the increase in World Heritage studies.
In Italy Master’s are post-degree courses of a scientific perfection nature and high permanent and ongoing formation, designed for students but also for professionals who feel the need to upgrade their qualifications. Master’s degrees supply knowledge and skills of a professional nature, at technical-operative or design-related level.
I set out from a basic consideration:
The curating of Cultural Heritage imposes ongoing reflections on and updating of conservation and promotional models. This fact implies a total rethinking of the tools employed for improving the enjoyment and positive exploitation of Heritage. Digital technologies are the new frontier: they increase interactivity, facilitate enjoyment but above all they are new languages of narration.
In this perspective awareness becomes necessary: Heritage, the legacy of culture, is increasingly more, and should be increasingly less, bound by Digital Heritage. An immense archive, with different levels of accessibility, exploitable, conservable, which contains our memory of the past; but which may and must be conceived first and foremost as a living environment where experiences can be lived and knowledge and identity recreated.
With regard to these challenges the Universities are absolutely capable of drawing up performing responses, in particular by safeguarding a specific sector which in the United States already has a long tradition, whereas in Italy it is beginning to be followed with accentuated awareness but for only a few years.