REMEMBER: an Adriatic network of Virtual Museums to highlight ports culture, traditions and history

Abstract

The paper presents an on-going Interreg Italy-Croatia project, funded in the period 2019-2021 under the specific objective “Make natural and cultural heritage a leverage for sustainable and more balanced territorial development (3.1)”. The project REMEMBER (REstoring the MEmory of Adriatic ports sites. Maritime culture to foster Balanced tERritorial growth) has the overall objective to promote the shift toward sustainable tourism and blue growth in the Programme area through the valorization of the important maritime cultural tangible and intangible heritage of 8 Adriatic Italian and Croatian ports sites. The joint valorization will be carried out by the 10 project partners, with cross-cutting competences and multidisciplinary experience. Mainly REMEMBER project aims at increasing the attractiveness of local economies through the use of ICT for the digitalization of cultural contents and to differentiate the touristic offer reducing the tourism seasonality. At the current stage, the project has set up the methodological and theoretical framework in order to instantiate the Virtual Museums for the 8 ports. This common concept envisaged the development of a cloud based tool as first gate of the Virtual Museum project and provided all Project Partners with a baseline for setting up cultural and technological virtual museums, for the enhancement and promotion of ports cultural elements during the project implementation. The technical work packages, presented in the paper, establish also a common set of information as basis to reach the same digital outputs, compliant with the project goals: these outputs are called Digital Experiences and are connected to state of art technologies, enabling the dissemination of the tangible and intangible heritage related to eight port cities.