Mapping Sacred Spaces: Forms, Functions, and Aesthetics in Medieval Southern Italy

The project aims to fully analyze the arrangement of architectural sacred spaces in medieval Southern Italy, a dynamic area of interaction between different cultures that resulted in experimental and transcultural material and figurative products. The research focuses on the architectural space from the point of view of the articulation of the ritual areas and their decoration. A fundamental role in the creation of subspaces and the perception of the sacred was played by monumental liturgical furnishings (like screens, pulpits, ciboria), which today have either almost completely disappeared or have been dismantled and are sometimes preserved outside of their original context. The reconstruction and analysis of these furnishings (in terms of form, function, and aesthetic values) is among the first goals of the project.
Compared to other regions, Southern Italy is still little investigated from the point of view of the reconstruction of sacred spaces and liturgical contexts. Additionally, the scholarship has thus far neglected to apply to large parts of this area complex methodologies that take into account the interactions between space, image, and ritual performance. The potential offered today by the integration of archaeology and art history with digital technologies is particularly significant for this kind of reconstruction and analysis. The project is based on an approach that is both historical and archaeological. From the outset, it has been directed towards the systematization of the collected data in a digital archive and the formulation of hypothetical reconstructions of monumental liturgical furnishings and sacred spaces in their medieval facies.
One of the main products of the Mapping Sacred Spaces project, which offers a new tool for future studies on the Italian South, is the establishment of a corpus of liturgical furnishings and their components, with appendices regarding materials, techniques, and ornamental motifs employed. The digital archive database, aligned with current standards for semantic web and linked open data and tailored to the specific research needs of the project, has been designed and created over the past three years by Ruggero Longo and Elisabetta Scirocco in close collaboration with Alessandro Adamou (BHMPI DH Lab) and the help of Polina Voronova (BHMPI DH Lab). The digital infrastructure of this database has been completed and the archive is currently being implemented by a group of specialists affiliated with the BHMPI and six universities located in Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
For selected monuments, a digital reconstruction of lost furnishings is being realized through multidimensional 3D and 4D modelling. In this field, recent case studies include: the reconstruction of the appearance (c. 1200) of a monumental paschal candelabrum in Amalfi cathedral (heavily tampered with in the 18th century), achieved by drawing upon archaeological and archaeometric observations made in a digital environment thanks to digital twins; and the reconstruction of the choir screens and ambo of Monreale cathedral (c. 1180, destroyed 1658) by applying HBIM (Historic/Heritage Building Information Modeling) technology.