October 2026 — On Sunday 11 October Carlo De Togni was a guest at the RAM Film Festival at the MART in Rovereto, one of the few Italian festivals dedicated to archaeology and memory cinema, now in its 37th edition.
The session took the form of a dialogue with Arianna Traviglia, Director of the Centre for Cultural Heritage Technology at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, whose research sits at the interface between technology and the humanities: artificial intelligence, computer vision, robotics and nanotechnology applied to archaeological and artistic heritage.
Two perspectives, built on very different experiences and scales of work, around a shared theme: the potential and the responsibilities of AI in the research and narration of cultural heritage.
The point Carlo brought to the centre of the conversation concerns historical plausibility. Generative AI has made it possible to produce convincing images of any past, in any direction, at the click of a button. The question this opens is methodological: how do you construct not just any past, but a past that could have existed?
The answer starts with sources. Archives, costume studies, architectural and contextual documentation become the ground on which to orient generation, build a historically grounded worldbuilding and subject it to a process of cross-validation. An approach that shifts the centre of gravity from production to pre-production and research, documenting where interpretive licence is exercised and where historical accuracy is maintained.
The RAM audience, made up of archaeologists, art historians and documentary filmmakers, offered a particularly stimulating context for bringing these reflections outside the strictly cinematic domain.
More information: