The Small Baths in Hadrian’s Villa. A ground test for enhancing the approach to the digital survey and reconstruction for archaeologists and architects

Giorgio VERDIANI¹ / Alessandro BLANCO² / Mirco PUCCI¹

(¹Dipartimento di Progettazione dell’architettura, Florenze, Italy / ²Università di Roma, La Sapienza, Italy)

Outline: Integration between archaeologists and architects research, digital survey for monitoring, diagnostic and for scientific digital reconstruction, high quality in digital reconstruction.

The Small Baths are an awesome architecture in the well known Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli. This monument, with its set of complete vaults, rich masonry, articulated and well readable technical solutions, represents a perfect confrontation ground for architects and archaeologists for a better understanding of the site.
Methodology/Approach: In the last five years we surveyed with laserscan technology a large part of the Hadrian’s Villa, the whole work has been coordinated to fulfil specific needs of documentation and survey, all the gathered data has been referenced each other to compose an unique “ready for the use” survey. In the Small Baths it has been possible to develop a collaboration based on the digital survey/representation to start a better understanding of the site where all the digital reconstruction starts according to a rigorous approach preferring a step by step process.
Results: In this work in progress about the Small Baths, we completed two first important tasks: the whole monument is accurately surveyed, and the digital model based on its pointcloud covers almost any internal and external parts of the building. A complete textured and normal mapped three-dimensional digital model has been realized for all the internal parts of the baths. This whole set of digital and three dimensional elements are used as the base for checking the status of the main structures as well to be integrated by the archaeologist datum to start and to verify virtual reconstructions.
Innovations: This research is aimed to knowledge and to build little by little a robust relationship between technologies, skills, archaeological and architectonic reading of the monument, archaeologists and architects are working here side by side for enhancing and integrating each others to produce information about the future and the past of this important monument.

Keywords: digital survey, 3D reconstruction, small baths, Hardrian’s Villa, Villa Adriana