Showing the evolution of the city of Trento across centuries

The paper illustrates the result of an extensive project which has brought to the creation of a vast repository of information of historical interest related to the evolution across history of the town of Trento, in the Italian Alps. The project has brought to the creation of a single point of access to a large set of data such as 3D models, documents, pictures and videos related to the evolution of the town and it has made them available in an interactive form through the use of a popular Geobrowser. Users can navigate the territory across space and time and interact with the system to explore a very large set of documents and information that help them understand how the city has evolved. The resulting application has been accessed by more than two thousand people during an exposition which has lasted for a month and it has been regarded as an essential didactical tool. The work represents a relevant example of how applications originally designed to access geographical information can be adopted, with a different perspective, as effective educational media. Besides being a gateway to information available on a territorial scale the system in fact allowed the superimposition of ancient and modern urban context helping to reduce the gap between ancient and modern urban context whose evolution represents the historical identity of a city.