Between tradition and innovation: 3d documentation of Enna’s monuments

The most important value of pictures, though often neglected, is that they are an inexhaustible source of knowledge for both architerctural historians and restoration architects. Nowadays, tools for sharing photo albums like Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, etc., fulfil an essential function of "reality" documentation. The new generation of laser scanners can deliver accurate measurements of architectural structures and their environment, and also makes it possible to publish scanned data on the Internet. Differently from images, however, the model obtained from a point cloud is an enormous catalogue, a sort of "solid" photograph which allows the material state of an architectural object to be "penetrated". This paper aims to address the issue of the new frontier represented by laser scanning methodology and its usefulness in the field of documenting cultural assets, starting from the objectives (and showing the first results) of a wide-ranging project of Web-documentation of Central Sicilyì's cultural heritage.