The Multimedia Room of the Scrovegni Chapel. A Virtual Heritage Project

The Scrovegni Chapel, painted by Giotto in the period 1303-1305, is one of the most important masterpiece of the European art. Because of serious problems of preservation, the paintings have been restored in the last two years but the accessibility of the monument is now restricted to a little number of visitors (20 people any time) and to a short time (15 minutes). In order to solve these problems of fruition the municipality of Padua planned the creation of an hypermedia room (10 x 20 m) hosting multimedia and museum installations concerning the contextualization of Giotto's world and of the Scrovegni Chapel. The most important installation is a virtual reality system created by the Institute of Technologies Applied to Cultural Heritage of National Research Council, aimed to a spatial 3D reconstruction and re- composition of the information regarding Giotto's paintings and the internal architecture of the monument (33.000 polygons in real time, 500 links, more than 100 menus). In this way the visitors of the Chapel (last year about 600.000) can prepare virtually the real visit to the monument (1st alphabetisation) and then, they can come back to the virtual installation in order to integrate all the information they need (2nd re-alphabetisation). We have defined this process of digital cultural learning through virtual exhibitions "musealising the Virtual": the use of VR tools and applications will increase a reticular cultural learning (despite the traditional "linear" learning), catalysing new consumes of virtual heritage.