What do we mean today by cultural heritage? It’s anything but a rhetorical question. In a globalized world, shaped by a variety of perspectives, memories, and identities, recognizing, documenting, and protecting cultural heritage requires a shift in perspective. A simple formal label of “heritage” is not enough, nor is inclusion in institutional inventories or under UNESCO’s umbrella: what we call heritage is born from an ongoing negotiation between shared values, local experiences, historical narratives, and visions of the future.
Cultural heritage is not just about what once was – it’s about what continues to speak, to evolve, to create connections. It’s what communities recognize as their own and as meaningful. In this sense, heritage is not a closed list of objects to be protected, but a dynamic network of relationships, memories, and practices – often invisible, often at risk.
Old and new threats – climate change, overtourism, natural disasters, conflicts, urban pressure, and the loss of traditional knowledge – push us to rethink how we see, study, and pass on heritage. Not to guard it passively, but to live it consciously, creatively, and sustainably.
From this awareness comes CHEDAR – Cultural Heritage Digitalisation and Reconstruction, a project coordinated by the University of Florence with the support of the Ministry of Universities and Research, as part of the Legacy Expo 2020 Dubai program. The initiative brings together universities, research centers, AFAM institutions, heritage agencies, and international partners such as ICOMOS Italy and CIPA Heritage Documentation.
CHEDAR has established a Research and Higher Education Center dedicated to the digitalisation, regeneration, and safeguarding of cultural heritage. It operates in highly exposed contexts, such as the wider Mediterranean, where fragility and richness intersect. It combines the humanities with cutting-edge technologies. It promotes resilient, replicable models of cooperation. It bridges humanistic knowledge with technological innovation. It develops tools and strategies to document, protect, share, and transmit cultural heritage. Technologies include 3D surveying and scanning, predictive risk models, advanced diagnostics, environmental monitoring systems, Heritage Digital Twin, artificial intelligence, and accessibility solutions. The project is built on four key pillars:
1. Documentation and Digitalisation
Digitalisation is central to strategies for preventing heritage loss. The goal is to create interoperable, reliable resources, while enhancing existing data. Advanced knowledge management systems, powered by AI, are being developed to analyze, classify, and make cultural information accessible, helping build a sustainable, shared digital memory.
2. Safeguarding and Conservation
By combining diagnostic technologies, monitoring tools, and restoration practices, new approaches to conservation are possible. Historic craftsmanship, traditional materials, and local skills are being valued and reinterpreted in a contemporary, sustainable way. Risk mitigation strategies adopt low-impact materials and solutions that can support cultural assets throughout their life cycle.
3. Enhancement and Accessibility
Digital technologies open new pathways for access, understanding, and dialogue between heritage and society. Inclusive, sensory, and participatory experiences are being designed. Digital data are reused within cultural and creative industries to generate narratives, design, installations, and immersive environments. The aim is equitable, generative access, where culture becomes a right, an experience, and an opportunity.
4. Climate Change and Risks
Predictive tools, dynamic digital twins, sensor networks, and GeoAI platforms help identify and tackle environmental threats on both local and regional scales. The Mediterranean – one of the areas most affected by climate change – is the project’s main field of action. Here, knowledge becomes a strategic tool for planning adaptation measures, strengthening resilience, and building responses based on data and awareness.
Expo 2025 Osaka: Mediterranean Heritage in the Digital Era: Facing Risks and Building Sustainability
After the success of the David at Expo 2020 Dubai, a high-definition digital and physical 1:1 scale replica of a world heritage masterpiece – an icon of a new alliance between art, science, and technology– CHEDAR continues its international journey, arriving at Expo 2025 Osaka, where it will present its intervention model through events, workshops, and immersive installations.
On August 30, 2025, CHEDAR Day in Osaka will focus on the theme: Mediterranean Heritage in the Digital Era: Facing Risks and Building Sustainability, structured into two thematic panels and five hands-on workshops, designed to show how digitalisation can become a driving force for knowledge, protection, and cultural dialogue.
Panel 1 – Reimagining Heritage
Dedicated to creativity in museums, digital reproduction, and cultural accessibility. Experts from universities, research institutions, and creative industries will discuss how 3D data can be transformed into material for new forms of storytelling, cultural engagement, and sustainable tourism.
Panel 2 – (Un)Faithful Twins
A reflection on how digital twins and mobile diagnostic technologies can help plan concrete risk mitigation measures in both territories and museums, in response to climate change and conflicts.
Alongside these discussions, five immersive workshops will embody CHEDAR’s participatory and multidisciplinary spirit:
- Heritage Explorers – A playful journey for children into Mediterranean heritage, combining games, storytelling, and shared identity.
- Capture It, Print It – From acquisition to 3D printing of an object: a hands-on workshop to understand the phases of digitization.
- Brancacci Point of View – An XR journey into the paintings of Masaccio and Masolino, discovering heritage through narrative gaming.
- Digitally Reviving the Grotta degli Animali – A virtual exploration of a Florentine masterpiece, with real-time data on temperature and humidity integrated into the VR simulation.
- Mediterranean Depths – A workshop on underwater heritage, combining photogrammetric surveying, immersive storytelling, and underwater archaeology.
A cultural strategy that goes beyond the event. Expo 2025 Osaka is not a point of arrival, but a milestone in a ten-year journey: CHEDAR will continue on to Expo 2030 Riyadh, with a program intertwining exhibitions, academies, laboratories, and territorial initiatives. It is the first time that a scientific legacy of the Expo has taken such a lasting and multifaceted form.
The Wider Mediterranean: A Relational Ecosystem Between Vulnerability and Situated Knowledge
CHEDAR places the Wider Mediterranean at the center of its mission. The Mediterranean is not a backdrop. It is a threshold, a crossroads, a place where layered memories, shared knowledge, geopolitical tensions, and environmental fragilities meet. CHEDAR embraces this plurality as the strategic axis of its action. Not to delimit an area, but to recognize it as a relational, multicentric space in continuous transformation.
As Fernand Braudel once wrote: “What is the Mediterranean? A thousand things at once. Not a single landscape, but many landscapes. Not a single sea, but a succession of seas. Not a single civilization, but a series of civilizations.”
Within this complexity, cultural heritage takes on a fundamental role: not only as a trace of the past, but as an infrastructure of dialogue, care, and cooperation. Climate change, overtourism, human pressures, inequalities, and political instability affect the territories of the Wider Mediterranean in transversal and uneven ways, putting at risk tangible and intangible heritage, places and practices, identities and forms of coexistence.
CHEDAR responds to these challenges through a transnational network of universities, cultural institutions, heritage agencies, and local communities. It activates operational projects, co-design laboratories, educational programs, and technological transfer tools. It promotes open, situated, and shared knowledge. It integrates scientific expertise with local memories. It recognizes the value of traditional practices and connects them with innovation.
In this vision, to document means to protect. To know means to prevent. To educate is a transformative act that generates awareness, capacity, and new forms of cultural citizenship.
The Wider Mediterranean thus becomes a working laboratory, where sustainable models of heritage protection and regeneration are tested. A context in which digitalisation becomes an alliance, culture becomes infrastructure, and heritage is acknowledged as a common good, to be lived, safeguarded, and shared.
CHEDARacademy: Building Knowledge, Creating Experiences
Training is a strategic axis of the CHEDAR project, a structural dimension, a driver of transformation working in constant dialogue with research. Training works alongside research, supports it, amplifies its results, and shares them with the world. CHEDARacademy is its educational platform: a space for experimentation, a meeting point between disciplines, languages, and territories.
It promotes inclusive, flexible, modular, interdisciplinary education. It develops advanced skills in the fields of documentation, diagnostics, environmental analysis, and the creative reuse of data. It connects artificial intelligence and artisanal practices, technical culture and humanistic knowledge.
The approach is active, participatory, rooted in experience. Learning takes place in integrated environments – physical, digital, territorial – designed to respond to real needs. The classroom becomes a field laboratory, the lecture a shared experiment, the teacher an architect of cognitive contexts.
Content is not transmitted: maps, tools, and strategies are co-constructed. Skills emerge from the meeting of disciplines, from the integration of research and practice, from the dialogue between perspectives. In this horizon, training means recognizing the plurality of knowledge, deconstructing dominant narratives, generating knowledge that is situated, shared, and multiple.
In an interconnected global context, CHEDARacademy moves beyond linear and Eurocentric educational models. It promotes a culture of connection, recognizes local knowledge, integrates different visions of heritage, and deconstructs hierarchies. A synchronic reading of events, in which everything happens simultaneously on a planetary scale, requires new forms of orientation. Training also means helping to interpret this complexity, overcoming diachronic, linear views often centered on a single cultural perspective. We need to build cognitive maps that are networked, inclusive, able to embrace plural knowledge and multiple perspectives, fostering a culture of connection rather than of sequence.
CHEDARacademy is aimed at students, researchers, professionals, public officials, and cultural operators. It offers interdisciplinary courses, on-site and digital laboratories, MOOCs, masterclasses, international mobility programs, and seasonal schools.
Training thus becomes a widespread laboratory, where solutions are designed, visions developed, sustainable practices tested. New professional figures are formed, capable of accompanying the digital transition of cultural heritage, guiding conservation and resilience strategies, and valorizing data and content in ethical and sustainable ways.
The horizon is twofold: the Wider Mediterranean – a relational, multicentric space, fragile yet rich in heritage and expertise – and a broader international scenario, where common challenges require systemic vision, intercultural dialogue, and transnational cooperation. CHEDARacademy builds networks, fosters exchanges, and promotes shared visions. Learning takes place by doing, in real and digital environments, with the aim of generating concrete impact on territories.
By spring 2026, the first MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) will be available:
- Cultural heritage: instructions for use (Accademia Carrara) – Introduction to cultural heritage, its values, stakeholders, and contemporary challenges. Learn to approach heritage with awareness, sensitivity, and responsibility.
- Driving the Digital Shift in Heritage: From 3D Data to its Re-use (Università degli Studi di Firenze) – Explore the full digital lifecycle of cultural heritage: from 3D documentation and metadata standards to digital archiving, sharing, and ethical data re-use across platforms.
- Diagnostics, Monitoring, and Risk Assessment. (CNR-ISPC) – Knowledge, Management, and Conservation of Cultural Heritage: From Archaeological Excavation to the Museum Environment.
- Stone Under Pressure: Sustainable Conservation for Stone Artifacts (Università degli Studi della Tuscia) – Tackle environmental, structural, and human-made challenges threatening stone heritage. Learn about risk-informed strategies and eco-friendly materials for long-term sustainability.
- Wood: Knowledge, Conservation and Restoration. The Point of View Related to the Environment and Territory (Università degli Studi della Tuscia) – Address the conservation of wooden artifacts using innovative and sustainable methods for preservation.
- Digital Technologies and Historic Gardens: Strategies for Managing Complexity between Natural and Architectural Heritage and Risks (Università degli Studi di Firenze) –
Explore the intersection of landscape, ecology, and digital technology in preserving historic gardens and hybrid heritage spaces exposed to climate change and urban expansion. - Real or Fake? A Guide to the Protection and Digital Use of Cultural Heritage (Università degli Studi Roma Tre) – Explore the boundaries between original and replica, physical and digital. Delve into ethics, protection, and responsible reproduction in heritage management and dissemination.
Creativity, Accessibility, and New Forms of Cultural Experience
In line with its founding principles, CHEDAR promotes an evolved and inclusive vision of the museum: no longer a static place of preservation, but a dynamic and relational environment, where technology, active engagement, and creativity intertwine to build new forms of dialogue between heritage and society.
Digital transformation, together with a growing awareness of inclusion and sustainability, calls for a profound rethinking of museum institutions. The museum of the future can no longer limit itself to safeguarding: it must open up, interact, evolve. It must be accessible, participatory, multisensory. Not to simply include those at the margins, but to fully recognize their right to access and to co-construct cultural meaning.
In this scenario, digital technologies – from extended reality to immersive environments, from smart sensors to interactive tools – do not replace direct experience, but amplify it. The data generated in documentation and digitalisation processes become active resources: they fuel personalized journeys, creative workshops, and educational initiatives for schools, families, local communities, people with disabilities, and cultural travelers. Accessibility becomes a structural foundation, not a marginal addition.
CHEDAR promotes the museum of the future as a hub of knowledge, an educational space, and a relational platform. A place that engages with its territory, merges with the urban fabric, works with communities, and creates shared content together with schools, associations, institutions, and cultural and creative industries. Heritage is not only exhibited: it is enacted, reinterpreted, co-designed.
Through a network of collaborations with museums, universities, heritage agencies, and cultural operators, the project develops replicable, scalable, low-impact models, adaptable both to large exhibition centers and to small local realities. To innovate the museum means rethinking the way society recognizes itself in its heritage, generating new meanings, relationships, and sustainable forms of valorization.