Articles by Francesco di Gennaro

The III municipality (formerly the IV) of Rome, ever since the 1970’s, has been archaeologically documented in a particularly intensive way by the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma (SSBAR) in collaboration with a range of Italian and foreign scholars and institutes. This has resulted in an invaluable corpus of analogue and digital data archived by the SSBAR that is now being brought together in a single spatial database on protohistoric and Roman to medieval settlement and land use features, called SITAR. In this paper the contributors discuss the genesis, workings and actual state of SITAR, highlighting the cases of the Roman villa complex of Vigna Chiari or ‘di Faonte’ and the protohistoric settlements of Fidenae and Crustumerium, the latter serving as an example of collaboration between SSBAR and a foreign institute, in this particular case the Groningen Institute of Archaeology of the University of Groningen.

The article illustrates and discusses the planning and execution of an Internet site for the archaeological area of the ancient Latin city of Crustumerium. The city is located north of Rome and prospered from the ninth to the fifth centuries BC in parallel to Rome, which eventually conquered it. The text is divided into three parts. The first confronts problems linked to the presentation (and editing in response to new data) of a State controlled Internet site devoted to State controlled archaeological areas. The second clarifies the semiotic choices made during the creation of pages which synthesise various aspects of the archaeological discipline. The third concerns to the editing principles employed to reconcile the logic of hypertext with popular scientific presentation. A last section offers a commentary of a small selection of Internet sites belonging to institutions which present archaeological areas, grouped into three sections.