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Abstract Microclimate change related events affect cities total environment and therefore citizens’ wellbeing. In a framework of urban resilience challenge, it is important to guarantee thermally comfortable conditions to dwellers in outdoors but also to preserve cultural heritage masterpieces for tourism and local socio-cultural identity. This work couples an innovative field monitoring at multiple scales and a validated numerical modelling effort to identify indoor and outdoor critical conditions at the present time and in the future, according to IPCC climate change forecast scenarios. The authors focused the attention on the overheating risk of Gubbio historical city center, in central Italy. Experimental data analysis highlights the microclimate granularity of the case study with detected temperature discrepancies up to 2.5 °C observed at pedestrian height during the hottest hour, i.e. 2p.m. Collected data are then used to validate the numerical models of (i) the most significant building of the city and (ii) its surroundings to investigate indoor/outdoor thermal comfort stress due to climate change and local overheating. The combined analysis shows that indoor operative temperature reaches 32 °C on average in 80 years, compared to the current 29 °C value. In the outdoors, apparent temperature increases by about 10 °C on 2100, being responsible for a serious threat compromising socio-cultural life, human health and outdoor and recreational activities.

Ancient human remains have the potential to explain a great deal about the prehistory of humankind. Due to recent technological and bioinformatics advances, their study, at the palaeogenomic level, can provide important information about population dynamics, culture changes, and the lifestyles of our ancestors. In this study, mitochondrial and nuclear genome data obtained from human bone remains associated with the Neolithic Globular Amphorae culture, which were recovered in the Megalithic barrow of Kierzkowo (Poland), were reanalysed to gain insight into the social organisation and use of the archaeological site and to provide information at the individual level. We were able to successfully estimate the minimum number of individuals, sex, kin relationships, and phenotypic traits of the buried individuals, despite the low level of preservation of the bone samples and the intricate taphonomic conditions. In addition, the evaluation of damage patterns allowed us to highlight the presence of “intruders”—that is, of more recent skeletal remains that did not belong to the original burial. Due to its characteristics, the study of the Kierzkowo barrow represented a challenge for the reconstruction of the biological profile of the human community who exploited it and an excellent example of the contribution that ancient genomic analysis can provide to archaeological reconstruction.

Azathioprine is a cornerstone of the therapy of Crohn’s disease. Unfortunately, infections and malignancies are relatively common adverse effects related to this drug; however, cirrhosis is exceptionally reported as a side effect. We report the case of a 49-year-old male patient with ileocolonic steno-penetrating Crohn’s disease who developed hepatic cirrhosis while treated with azathioprine. After taking azathioprine for 3 years with regular follow-up, he developed pancytopenia, and liver cirrhosis was diagnosed with ultrasound, abdomen computed tomography scan, transient elastography, and liver biopsy. As all other causes of liver damage were excluded, azathioprine was believed to be the cause of liver injury and therefore was interrupted.

Abstract The removal of aged pressure sensitive tapes (PSTs) from contemporary drawings is a frequent and challenging task for paper conservators: in this work, an innovative method to overcome this issue is presented. Aged PSTs are largely found on paper artworks due to their use for mending, mounting and framing operations. Nevertheless, they may provoke several drawbacks on artworks (e.g. media bleeding and adhesive mass migration): the necessity of their removal promoted the development of several methodologies, but they all pose risks to both artefacts and conservation professionals. We propose a method involving polymeric gels able to load a “green” solvent, pertaining to the class of alkyl carbonates, which efficiently interacts with PSTs components; the embedment of the solvent into the gel network allows a feasible and effective intervention where the gel is directly applied on the top surface of the PST: the solvent gradually penetrates through the plastic layer of the PST (as proved by laser scanning confocal microscopy measures), swelling the underlying adhesive. In this way, the solvent-artwork contact is controlled. In order to optimize the processing costs and final properties of the gels, three formulations of poly (ethyl methacrylate)-diethyl carbonate (PEMA-DEC) organogels were synthesized, using different diluents and additives. A thorough physicochemical investigation of the systems was performed by means of rheology, gravimetric analysis, thermogravimetry, and IR Spectroscopy. After assessment on representative mock-up samples, the developed systems were successfully used for the removal of six aged PSTs from a drawing on paper by Keith Haring.

The contribution concerns the possibilities of utilization of the digital technologies focused on the documentation of the historical centers. The aim of the project is to evaluate the conservation status of the Heritage and the possibilities and opportunities of valorization and requalification of the historical urban core through projects that show a high level of compatibility with the environment. In relation to these methodologies grows the need to take the inhabitants back to live again the historical center creating spots of complete requalification through the instruments of the architecture. The reading of the places in complete or partial decay and abandon status wants, hence, to get the basis for the preservation of them through precise interventions so that they can create significant synergies in which the inhabitants – through the architecture and their life – come back to inhabit that is to live again those places that, otherwise, time would take away letting forget and lose to the world extraordinary parties of landscape.

Technology and the fruition of cultural heritage are becoming increasingly more entwined, especially with the advent of smart audio guides, virtual and augmented reality, and interactive installations. Machine learning and computer vision are important components of this ongoing integration, enabling new interaction modalities between user and museum. Nonetheless, the most frequent way of interacting with paintings and statues still remains taking pictures. Yet images alone can only convey the aesthetics of the artwork, lacking is information which is often required to fully understand and appreciate it. Usually this additional knowledge comes both from the artwork itself (and therefore the image depicting it) and from an external source of knowledge, such as an information sheet. While the former can be inferred by computer vision algorithms, the latter needs more structured data to pair visual content with relevant information. Regardless of its source, this information still must be be effectively transmitted to the user. A popular emerging trend in computer vision is Visual Question Answering (VQA), in which users can interact with a neural network by posing questions in natural language and receiving answers about the visual content. We believe that this will be the evolution of smart audio guides for museum visits and simple image browsing on personal smartphones. This will turn the classic audio guide into a smart personal instructor with which the visitor can interact by asking for explanations focused on specific interests. The advantages are twofold: on the one hand the cognitive burden of the visitor will decrease, limiting the flow of information to what the user actually wants to hear; and on the other hand it proposes the most natural way of interacting with a guide, favoring engagement. accepted at FlorenceHeritech 2020

Research for this article had the purpose of exploring medieval Armenian–Ethiopian connections. The investigations revealed three main contexts where Ethiopia and Ethiopians feature in the Armenian sources of the first millennium, without necessarily implying real-life encounters. Firstly, the earliest Armenian texts locate Ethiopia and discuss the genealogy of its people in line with the biblical account of the Diamerismos, as well as notions based on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Chronicle translated into Armenian from Syriac in the fifth century. Each author, then, interpreted this information according to his narrative needs or the purpose of a given composition. The discussion of these sources reveals the circulation of classical and Hellenistic notions on Ethiopia and the Ethiopians in Armenian, too, such as the confusion between Ethiopia, Arabia, and India, as well as anthropological or spiritual features attributed to Ethiopians already by classical authors. Secondly, the article analyses a series of calendrical treatises, starting with one authored by the seventh-century polymath Anania Širakac‘i, that passed on a short tale about a sixth-century gathering of scholars in Alexandria in order to determine the date of the Easter and establish tables for its calculation in the future. An Ethiopian wise man Abdiē was part of this international endeavour too, according to this tradition, and his presence marked Ethiopia as part of the eastern Mediterranean learned world, with its own cultural traditions. Armenian language hemerologia also preserved month names in Gǝʿǝz, reproduced in the Appendix. Thirdly, the article draws attention to a completely new way of viewing Ethiopia in ninth- to eleventh-century Armenian anti-dyophysite (antiByzantine) treatises where the Armenian Church and its doctrines or ritual practices were imagined as part of a vast, non-dyophysite orthodox world that included the Ethiopian Church. Intriguingly, this argumentative technique, formulated in terms that one may callanti-colonial ante litteram, may be traced among Coptic and Syriac polemicists as well, a subject of research that would benefit from further analysis.

Heritage planning is the preservation, conservation, rehabilitation, restoration and management of heritage resources. This paper aims to propose an approach for specifying the values and importance of historic sites. In this study, the Historic Ur­ban Landscape approach is taken as the research framework. This approach mo­ves beyond the preservation of the physical environment and focuses on the entire human environment with all its tangible and intangible qualities. It seeks to increa­se the sustainability of planning and design interventions by taking into account the existing built environment, intangible heritage, cultural diversity, socio-economic and environmental factors along with local community values. This study indicates that a values-centered planning approach has emerged as a way of formalizing strategies for dealing with preservation challenges. The importance of values-centered preserva­tion is the framework it offers for dealing holistically with historic sites and addressing both the contemporary and historic values of a place, a task which includes a report comprising written material and graphic material. The contents of the report should be arranged to suit the site and the limitations on the task, but it will generally be in two sections: first, the assessment of cultural significance and second, the statement of cultural significance. Therefore, determining the significance of historic places is to be considered as the basis for planning and implementing management strategies and sustainable development. Furthermore, heritage planning needs a progression that goes from identification, to evaluation, to management and together form a basis for preservation policies. Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage, Vol 18 (2018)

International audience; The identification of the earliest dogs is challenging because of the absence and/or mosaic pattern of morphological diagnostic features in the initial phases of the domestication process. Furthermore, the natural occurrence of some of these characters in Late Pleistocene wolf populations and the time it took from the onset of traits related to domestication to their prevalence remain indefinite. For these reasons, the spatiotemporal context of the early domestication of dogs is hotly debated. Our combined molecular and morphological analyses of fossil canid remains from the sites of Grotta Paglicci and Grotta Romanelli, in southern Italy, attest of the presence of dogs at least 14,000 calibrated years before present. This unambiguously documents one of the earliest occurrence of domesticates in the Upper Palaeolithic of Europe and in the Mediterranean. The genetic affinity between the Palaeolithic dogs from southern Italy and contemporaneous ones found in Germany also suggest that these animals were an important common adjunct during the Late Glacial, when strong cultural diversification occurred between the Mediterranean world and European areas north of the Alps. Additionally, aDNA analyses indicate that this Upper Palaeolithic dog lineage from Italy may have contributed to the genetic diversity of living dogs. Dogs were the first animals domesticated by humans, long before the advent of agriculture 1. Besides occupying a special place in our present day lives, dogs had important functional and symbolic roles throughout human history. However, the spatiotemporal context of their early domestication is debated from both archaeological and genetic perspectives: there is scant consensus on the location of first domestication centres, and the presence of one or more domestication events 1-5 , as well as a debate on the correct identification of the oldest archaeological specimens considered to represent dogs 6-11. Latest genetic models suggest the presence of dogs in Europe at least 15,000 years ago, and a divergence between dogs and wolves between about 20,000 and 40,000 years ago 5,12. Earlier potential dog domestication attempts may be represented by canid remains from Northern and Eastern Europe, and Russia 6-9,13-15 , even if their attribution to dogs or wolves is debated 5,10,16-20. The earliest archaeological specimens unequivocally attributed to dogs lived around 16,000 years ago 21-23 , and were related to Magdalenian contexts in Western Europe. Available genetic evidence suggests that the domestication process open 1