The survey as experience of critical reading: the case of villa Rufolo in Ravello

The work that the present paper summarizes expresses the results of a wider research conducted within the PhD in Structural Engineering and Building and Urban Rehabilitation, active in the Department of Civil Engineering - Salerno University. The research entitled Integrated Surveys of architectural heritage. The laser scans and the digital processing (PHD Maria Rosaria Cundari; tutor prof. Vincenzo Iannizzaro; cotutor prof. Barbara Messina), have addressed several particularly relevant issues in the field of representation and documentation of historical built heritage. The target also has been test the reliability of a procedure to survey and interpret the architecture, with reference to deeply transformed buildings. In these cases, in fact, the documentation, firstly but not only metric-formal, is the starting point for a real knowledge. Then, recovering – albeit only virtually – shapes and features deduced from experimental data, it finally becomes possible a space's reading, back in time, through infographic modelling, so returning its original image.