Widespread Difficulties and Applications in the Monitoring of Historical Buildings: The Case of the Realm of Venaria Reale

Environmental monitoring represents a key step for restaurateurs to follow who strive to ensure the preservation of buildings and artifacts while allowing for people’s thermal comfort. This paper describes the possibilities and main issues arising from the study of indoor microclimates. The presented case study focuses on the monitoring data analysis for two rooms of the Realm of Venaria Reale, in Turin. The adopted methodology provides for the gathering of knowledge about the history, the geometry, and the change of use in the course of the lifetime of the building. This information allows us to construct a virtual model of the building, through which it is possible to evaluate the past and present and to hypothesize future scenarios regarding the indoor environmental conditions. Moreover, this paper presents a specific index, namely the Heritage Microclimate Risk (HMR), which enables us to evaluate the risk level to which the artifacts kept within historic buildings are exposed. With that database of information, we can preemptively define which actions (managerial and structural) would need to be taken for the preservation of the artifacts and the building itself, avoiding the possible risk component taken by working on the real building.