Saturday, January 20, 2018

The Built Heritage

 It's our first night in Amalfi and we have loved the views that this city brings! And, in just one week we will have completed our course in Italy and will be on our way back home. I think that we can all agree that this trip has been one of the most incredible experiences that we will ever have, and we are eternally grateful for the opportunity to visit all kinds of different museums, galleries, and historically significant buildings. Locals are so excited and eager to share their culture with us and it's so wonderful to see the passion that they have for their very own heritage.

However, one of the more prevalent issues in some of these culturally significant areas we have been visiting is the problem of preserving some of the built heritage that represents their cultural significance. With so many visitors walking through the museums, cathedrals, and galleries, preservation is a constant concern. On top of that, Italy is overflowing with built heritage so it is becoming more and more difficult to keep up with the need to preserve these culturally significant sites. How can resources be allocated efficiently to preserve all of the different built heritage in Italy? This seems to be a very difficult question for historians, economists, and archaeologists to answer.

Some historians and archaeologists have argued that the idea of "virtual tours" is something that we should start to incorporate in order to preserve the built heritage and keep these beautiful structures from decaying. For example, a virtual tour might be a video that is played upon entrance into a museum that shows you all of the museum and all of the information about the items inside of it. Instead of having the museum be toured all day with hundreds of people, tourists can enjoy a video upon entry and the problem of preserving these structures is nearly eliminated. This idea is something we discussed thoroughly as a class and everybody had different opinions about the matter. Everyone can agree upon the importance of preserving the built heritage, but your experience might change if instead of having a tour guide take you through the museum, you watch a video about the history instead. It is an interesting dilemma, because on one hand we want to maintain and remember our heritage, but at the same time, that is a difficult thing to do when many of the actual buildings are decaying from all of the time spent walking through and touring the different museums and galleries. Nonetheless, heritage must always be preserved, and the best representation of cultural development is in fact the museums, galleries, and cathedrals we have visited together, and these are some of the built heritage that should be appreciated and remembered.

 

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