Cultural heritage

Cultural heritage is a strategic resource for development. The classic definition of cultural heritage refers to ‘material evidence bearing witness to civilisation’. The sector cannot, therefore, be clearly distinguished from the rest of the world. In fact, the Italian specificity is precisely the inextricable link between the cultural heritage and its context, both the result of thousands of years of stratification. The growing demand by institutions and operators for technological and innovation support has therefore found its response in the involvement of many different scientific and technical areas. These have now created a varied framework of competences. At the Politecnico di Milano, laboratories devoted specifically to the complexity of cultural heritage stand side-by-side with others where field-specific scientific research is carried out and applied to cultural heritage with great success. Then there are other laboratories involving construction and environmental systems and components, and yet others providing technical support to data management and key support to cataloguing, programming, decision-making and communication.