SICAR RESTORATION OF RELIGIOUS WORKS OF ART IN URBINO

New restoration work on a cultural asset must be based on considerable professional skill, both in handling and sharing documents and data about the current site and simply to undertake the preparatory studies for future intervention. This is why Urbino's Carlo Bo University School of Conservation and Restoration has decided to try out using SiCaR, a web-based on-line IT system for documenting and planning Restoration Sites. The decision to follow a modern approach in managing Cultural Assets is based on the goal of finding the most effective way possible to collect and organise information and data about the restoration sites in order to facilitate planning in view of future interventions or in order to draw up a maintenance plan for each work. Experience so far in the Conservation and Restoration School laboratories with students and teachers shows that applying SICaR to mobile art works of a religious nature - only apparently less complex than immobile art works - helps to obtain a final thorough scientific overview, useful tools for supporting future management of the items undergoing restoration work. At the same time, the primary goal we had set ourselves was achieved - that of communicating to the public the historical and critical contents of restored works of art, with the help of an IT tool. The unrepeatable nature of restoration work, the uniqueness of this process which reflects the uniqueness of the work of art, implies that in every intervention, even the simplest, there has to be a more or less elevated, more or less explicit, perhaps more or less aware, element of research, innovation and experimentation. By adopting SiCAR as a tool for knowledge and management, we have achieved our goal of bringing together tradition and innovation, thus welding the relationship among heritage, culture, technology, innovation, economic development.