Promoting Bottom-Up Initiatives for the Sustainable Conservation of Hidden Cultural Landscapes Using Ubiquitous Digital Technologies

Massimino is a tiny Italian village located in a historically strategic position between the Piedmont and Liguria regions, counting just one hundred inhabitants and surrounded by woodland, on the slopes of a hill secretly dominated by the ruins of a hamlet from the middle ages. The ruins have a strong local identity value but, to date, are hardly accessible by locals and potential visitors alike. This paper proposes networking novel and ubiquitous digital technologies, advanced methods for architectural and landscape 3D survey to uncover and promote the latent resources of the place, thus also creating opportunities for the valorisation of diffused heritage assets populating the Italian territory. Through the case of Massimino, this research demonstrates the potential of integrating data from various sources, such as terrestrial close-range photogrammetry and aerophotogrammetry from UAVs, in a unique workflow to support sustainable heritage valorisation planning. Among other benefits this workflow allowed generating at a low cost an acceptable output with a varied level of definition, which increases only where needed. In future applications the proposal may be used to support collaborative and strategic decision-making, empower local communities, make historical analysis easier, and generate videos for engagement and dissemination purposes.