News Analysis: Italy, UNESCO to create task force for cultural heritage protection across the world

Italy and UNESCO have signed an agreement to create an Italian task force to protect the world's artistic heritage, an idea that the country had launched at a conference of culture ministries held at the Milan Expo in August.

The "Unite for Heritage" task force will consist of specialized personnel and private citizens with expertise in the sector, Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni and UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova explained at the signing celebration held in Rome on Tuesday.

These experts are expected to assess the risks to the cultural heritage, devise action plans, perform technical supervision, provide training courses for local staff, assist with the transport of movable things to safe shelters and fight against looting and traffic in cultural assets.

Concretely, the process works as follows: a UNESCO member state requests in a formal manner, through UNESCO, the intervention of the Italian task force. But the project is still at a first stage and all of this "will not be easy," Gentiloni highlighted.

The foreign minister defined the initiative as a "very Italian piece of the anti-terrorism strategy." In fact, the many monuments and works of art endangered by the violence of war or by the destruction of the Islamic State (IS) have been sadly witnessed by the international community.

But, most of all, the Italian initiative is "a sign to affirm that national treasures are treasures of humankind, and to provide all possible technological help to protect them, be it from terrorism or from natural disasters," Andrea Carandini, a renowned archeologist for his excavations and discoveries in Rome and president of the Italian National Trust (FAI), told Xinhua on Wednesday.

Despite the many threats to artistic heritage in today's world, much can be done to salvage something thanks to modern technologies. "In the past, when a monument was destroyed, it was entirely lost forever. Today we are able to perfectly save its cognitive heritage through its acquisition as point cloud," Carandini underlined.

It means that if a monument is accurately surveyed with a laser scanner, its cloud of points provides a measureable model rich of information, he explained to Xinhua. "When a monument is destroyed, if we have stored all of its information inside a computer, we can rebuild it perfectly in every last detail. Of course it will not be the original one, but it will be identical to the original," the archeologist pointed out.

The mix of advanced technologies that can lead to such a result in Italy is missing in other areas of the world, whose artistic heritage is therefore more at risk, Carandini noted. In this sense, the Italian initiative can set a good example to convince more and more nations to support the international missions under the UN aegis, he added.

Tuesday's agreement also includes the establishment in Turin - a city in northern Italy which is home of three UN agencies and various related organizations - of an international center for training and research on world heritage with the task of assisting UNESCO. Italy boasts 51 sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List and more than 170 archeological missions throughout the world.

Carandini acknowledged that his country is facing many difficulties as regards the protection of its artistic heritage. One example is that of Pompeii - the Roman city in southern Italy that was buried under ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. - which suffered a long series of collapses to the point that UNESCO in 2013 warned Italy that the ancient site was "destined to collapse entirely" unless urgent measures were taken.

Much more must be done to increase good practices, Carandini stressed. However, Italy in recent times has also made steps forward to draw attention to its large artistic heritage and especially encourage team work, both within Italy and with the rest of the world, the only way to bequeath these treasures to future generations, he said. Endit