Our collaboration with the “Associazione Museo San Benedetto” in via Crociferi in Catania began in 2020, with a shared goal: to make a place, that is both a cloistered convent and a cultural venue, accessible to visitors in a respectful, thoughtful way.
The Monastery of San Benedetto houses the Church of San Benedetto, recognised as part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing for the Late Baroque of the Val di Noto. This means that every aspect of the visitor experience must both highlight the cultural heritage and respect the site’s liturgical life.
The decision to phase out the rental audioguides used until 2019, due to maintenance costs and the new health regulations brought in during the Covid-19 pandemic, led to the choice of a new multimedia tool to support visits. This is how the museum’s multimedia web app was created: accessible directly on visitors’ own devices and designed to be easy to update over time.
The web app was conceived as a flexible platform that can grow with the museum. It hosts multilingual written and audio content, thematic insights and a geolocated map of Catania showing the main points of interest in the city.
The specific nature of the site, and the desire to enrich the cultural offer with spaces that cannot be visited physically, have gradually led to the creation of new digital contents such as virtual tours and 3D models.
Through an immersive virtual tour, the choir loft becomes a space that can be visited remotely, giving the public a sense of the functional complexity of the monastery.
To respond to cognitive accessibility needs, an immersive 3D model of the eighteenth-century parlour was also created. In this case, a virtual environment navigable with a 3D headset brings back to life one of the most emblematic spaces of the cloistered world, making visible what would otherwise remain hidden.
The digital reconstruction began with an environmental photogrammetry survey and drew on historical sources that show the parlour as it appeared at the end of the 19th century, as described by Giovanni Verga in his novel Storia di una capinera (Story of a blackcap).
Today, the multimedia experience at the “Museo San Benedetto” is a dynamic, constantly evolving system that enriches the physical visit with digital content designed to clarify, expand and contextualise what visitors see. It offers a way of entering the monastery with greater awareness, revealing the deep connections between cloistered life, architecture and cultural heritage.
Ricardo Bonina
Antonella Musumeci
Luna Meli
Livio Sgarlata