Dalla battaglia del passo di Kasserine alla Guerra Fredda: documentazione telerilevata storica per lo studio aerotopografico di Thelepte e Cillium (Turchia)

The battle of the Kasserine pass (February 19-25, 1943) is one of the most important events of the brief Italian-German counter-offensive carried out in central-western Tunisia against the Anglo-American troops landed between Morocco and Algeria a few months earlier. The battle, which involved a not large area of the Tunisian territory, included the sites of the ancient cities of Thelepte (1 km NE of the outskirts of Feriana) and Cillium (on the western outskirts of Kasserine), two important centres of Africa Proconsularis that up to now are not fully covered by studies concerning the reconstruction of the ancient topography of the settlements. The involvement of these two cities and their outskirtsin one of the scenarios of the Second World War is testified by a series of interesting aerial photographs taken by the Luftwaffe between November 1942 and January 1943, which show an image of the two centres before modern transformations. In addition to this important historical documentation, there are also some high-resolution space photos taken by the US Hexagon KH-9 spy satellites between 1973 and 1980, during the Cold War, recently available for civilian use, which document the successive transformations of the sites. Furthermore, the aero-topographic study of the two ancient cities, aimed at reconstructing their urban layout, is completed by the archaeological photo-interpretation of recent high-resolution satellite images acquired by the WorldView-2, GeoEye-1, World- View-3, Pléiades-1A/1B and Pléiades Neo-3 satellites.