Palazzo Vecchio, City Hall, Florence, Italy
| General Attributes |
DOI| 10.34946/D6W017 | |
| Project Name | Palazzo Vecchio, City Hall, Florence |
| Country | Italy |
| Status | Restricted |
| Citation |
| George Bent, Scott McAvoy, Lorenzo Vigotti, Florence As It Was, Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI) 2026: Palazzo Vecchio, City Hall, Florence - LiDAR - Terrestrial. Distributed by Open Heritage 3D. https://doi.org/10.34946/D6W017 |
| Data Type |
Size |
Device Name |
Device Type |
| LiDAR - Terrestrial | 800 GB | Leica RTC 360 | Time of Flight Scanner |
| Background |
| Site Description | The central civic palace of the Florentine comune was initiated in 1299, with the block facing the Piazza della Signoria completed by about 1310. With a rusticated exterior, no fenestration on its ground level, a crenelated top, and the largest bell tower in Florence (ordered by decree), the Palazzo Vecchio takes on the appearance of an impregnable urban fortress. This was originally underscored by a short wall, or ringhiera, that ran around building’s exterior on the northwest corner, creating a kind of buffer between its occupants – the priors, or elected officials of the republican government – and the populace in the city. The interior rooms have been largely rearranged over time, with the walls and ceilings of the apartments that were originally built as temporary residents for those priors expanded and contracted according to the needs of the commune at any given time. The courtyard was initiated by Michelozzo in 1453, the stairs a creation of multiple renovations, and the famous Sala dei 500 a product of the 1490s. The building still serves as the mayor’s office and the bureaucratic center of the city of Florence, although those areas are located in the 16th-century annexes to the east.
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| Project Description |
Florence As It Was has multiple aims within its broad goal of recreating selected structures in the city as they appeared in the year 1500. The pointclouds and photogrammetric models we build certainly serve their purposes as visual portals into the past, but the translations of early modern descriptions, transcriptions of contemporary documents, and the creation of a database of people, places, and things weaves these images into layers of information that help us interpret what we see. Intended as a study tool (as opposed to a substitution for the real thing), this project provides users with a combination of the type of original source materials that historians of art and architecture in particular typically use when crafting scholarly works. Its multi-variances routinely force us to make choices and adhere to a list of priorities as we go. We have progressed deliberately and with an eye toward posting the most original portions of our work first, and then filling in the gaps later on. We have concentrated much of our attention on the physically and politically challenging work of securing permissions, traveling to Florence, and then using state-of-the-art technology to scan the most important structures in the city before editing and modeling those scans so that they reflect accurately the dimensions and color patterns of those buildings.
refer to
Mcavoy, S. P, Bent, G., & Vigotti, L. (2025). Field Report: Palazzo Vecchio and Santa Maria Novella June 12- 30th 2025 Florence, Italy. UC San Diego: Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI) at Calit2. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xs6q5wc | |
| UNESCO World Heritage Site | Historic Centre of Florence |
| External Project Link | View exhibit |
| Collection Date | 2025-04-21 to 2025-06-27 |
| Publication Date | 2026-03-26 |
| License Type | Restricted |
| Model Information |
| Reuse Score | B - High-Quality Model without Georeferencing |
| Curator Notes | this dataset is restricted, to request access please consult the Florence as It Was Project
https://florenceasitwas.wlu.edu/
florenceasitwas@wlu.edu |
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