Evaluating Gismondi's Representation of Portus, the Port of Imperial Rome

Abstract

This paper introduces the Portus Project, an inter-disciplinary collaborative fieldwork project focussed on the ancient port of Rome. It demonstrates the use that is being made of a plaster model of the port produced by Italo Gismondi in 1937, initially as a means for focussing re-evaluations of the various illustrative and other data available relating to the port’s topography, and then as a source for background and comparative digital geometric data within the project’s work to remodel the entire site. The Portus Project employs three-dimensional computer graphics throughout the data gathering, analysis, modelling and representation phases and the paper considers the role that Gismondi’s model is playing in the development and evaluation of such a process.

Keywords

• Portus
• Gismondi
• Laser scanning