Connecting times: Using smart technologies for enhancing ancient downtown experience

The Campania region in Italy offers one of the largest and most valuable cultural heritages in the world. However the peculiarities of the heritage and the significant lack of resources affecting cultural heritages´ administrations make the strategies currently adopted for the maintenance and the promotion of these sites highly insufficient. It is current belief that the adoption of technologies and methodologies following the Smart Cities paradigm could significantly support cultural heritages administrations both in terms of sites organization and care, and in terms of artistic promotion and diffusion of knowledge. In this paper, we present the project Cultural Heritage Information System as a way to collect and implement different technologies aimed at enhancing user´s fruition of cultural sites while supporting the site management processes. We briefly discuss the technological challenges offered by the project and show a preliminary architecture infrastructure. Finally, we present Connecting Times, proposing the ancient DownTown of the city of Salerno as an actual case study in order to evaluate both existing and in-development technological solutions.