Models of knowledge and development of the urban vegetal architecture. Villa Celimontana in Rome.

The historic gardens are an important piece in the mosaic of green areas in our cities. The theme of historic gardens regards a particular landscape context, one of the most significant in the urban green system. This paper is aimed to outline a theoretical framework to define the appropriate systems to interpret, analyze, document and draw data about complex vegetation systems such as the historic urban villas. The proposed methods, tested on Villa Celimontana in Rome, present the creation of a database and virtual archives applied to a particularly significant sample of the city of Rome. By using an interaction system between virtual databases and data provided by survey operations conducted through laser scanners and digital photogrammetric systems, a knowledge model for vegetal architecture is prefigured. This model integrates the understanding of quantitative digital archives with descriptive data of the examined subjects in order to create a tool which can act as the documentation base for any management, protection and preservation activities and offer the chance to share on the web a geo-referenced, dynamic map that can be interrogable and integrable with the knowledge of others users.