A Virtual Experience Across the Buried History

The Sant’Angelo cave church is an underground medieval Benedictine complex in the south of Italy, affected by serious structural and chemical degradation. In the context of a documentation campaign promoted by the local Superintendence and supported by the IPERIONCH.it project, we carried out an accurate 3D and photographic survey, and reconstructed a detailed 3D model of the site (encoding shape and colour). While the primary purpose of this large amount of collected data was to provide a metric documentation of the site, the completeness and the high detail of the survey suggested also a possible use for dissemination and virtual presentation. Thus, we exploited the 3D digital models to design and build a virtual visit of the church, oriented to scholars, museums and tourists. This paper describes the design and implementation of this educational experience, closely related to the bibliographic sources of the artistic heritage, fully enriched with hyper-textual information, intuitive and easy to use for all users regardless of their level of familiarity with the 3D medium.