Roma, tra Monumenti e Memorie

Monuments and Memoirs of Rome is a multimedia guide to the city, made for the information centres of the Roman agency set up to prepare for the Jubilee Year.

The guide contains 209 hypertext cards, covering 100 buildings and monuments in the city of Rome, 353 related pictures and maps, and 12 virtual panoramas letting the user see some of the most important monuments in Rome, naturally including the Basilica of St. Peter’s, in 3D graphic reconstructions.

The navigation layout is easy to understand, and information is provided in three groups: City Areas, Monuments, and Travel Diaries. The first two are interconnected by ordinary hypertext links and they contain the information cards with direct links to the pictures: period views, plans, illustrative maps, virtual reconstructions of views, and links to the Travel Diaries. The principal contents can be accessed through two main menus: the Map of City Areas and the Tour Gallery.

The Tour Gallery reproduces the environments of an eighteenth-century picture gallery inspired by the works of Giovanni Paolo Panini. The works on display illustrate the most important monuments arranged in seven Jubilee tours. A character walking through the rooms, possibly an aristocrat on the Grand Tour, shows us a Travel Diary with extracts from the memoirs of illustrious writers who visited the monuments in centuries gone by.

The pictures that accompany the information sheets are taken from prints by the most famous architects and scholars from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, such as Dupérac, Vasi, Specchi, Falda, Piranesi, Rossini, Canina and others.