Destroyed Places and Ancient Wars. Digital Tools for the Montecastrese Fortress

Abstract

In the XX century, after being forgotten for centuries, a series of archaeological excavations have brought to light the settlement, named “Montecastrese”, a system of Medieval fortifications organized on the top of a hill near the town of Camaiore, on the Tirreno sea. The archaeologists brought back to light the traces of the fortress and of the village, exploring the monumental ruins of the northern tower, still in place and tumbled down in two main large parts. In the first half of the XIII century, the castle of Montecastrese was conquered and destroyed by the army of Lucca. At the time of its major development the small fortress was organized around two main towers, with walls and various houses. A quite extended village was placed on the southern side of the hill. In 2015 the municipality of Camaiore commissioned a complete digital survey to the Dipartimento di Architettura in Florence. The general survey plan has seen the use of aerial photogrammetric survey, 3D laser scanner survey and terrestrial photogrammetry. The use of 3D modeling of all the lost parts, from the houses to the defense walls, to the system of towers was one of the focal point in this work, using the modeling process from the survey and supporting the reconstruction hypothesis with previous archaeological data, while matching the missing parts with similar architectures and the needs of the medieval defense/attack techniques. For the northern tower a specific operation based on the use of 3D printed models was brought on to bring to an end the debate about the sequence of the fall of the tower, quite important to the digital reconstruction of this building, the direct manipulation of a scaled model turned out to be a fundamental step for the completion of this part of the research.