Narrating Ancient Roman Heritage through Drawings and Digital Architectural Representation: From Historical Archives, UAV and LIDAR to Virtual-Visual Storytelling and HBIM Projects

One of the main objectives of today’s archaeological sites and museums is the development of research, understood as the interpretation and contextualisation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage to broaden the knowledge and accessibility of archaeological parks often unknown to visitors and the public on a large scale. In this perspective, the Appia Antica Archaeological Park aims to support research in digitising infrastructures and archaeological contexts of high historical and cultural value to plan short- and medium-term preservation and maintenance projects. In this context, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are tools with enormous potential in survey, inspection and digitisation, providing the basis for the subsequent phases of data interpretation, representation and material analysis. Thanks to the photorealistic reconstruction of dense structure from motion (DSfM) in the application of structural inspections, today it is possible to intercept the geometry and material conditions of small, medium and large structures, reducing the costs of inspections, limiting the interruption of the public and providing professionals and visitors with a better volumetric understanding of the system. However, inserting information that gradually accumulates throughout the process requires advanced 3D digital representation techniques, such as HBIM (historic building information modelling), scan-to-BIM approach and interactive forms, such as virtual and augmented reality (VR-AR). For these reasons, this study summarises the experience and lessons learned from the UAV inspection of three research case studies at archaeological, architectural, and infrastructure scales to increase awareness of the Roman-built heritage.