The Team

Architectural historian

Ludovica Galeazzo is an Associate Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Cultural Heritage (DBC) at the Università degli Studi di Padova and a Research Associate at I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC project VeNiss. Her research focuses on Venetian architecture in the early modern period with a special interest in new technologies to demonstrate the process of the city’s change over time.
She received her PhD from the Graduate School Ca’ Foscari-Iuav in Venice and was later a Research Fellow at the Università Iuav di Venezia (2013–16), a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University (2016–17), and a Digital Humanities Research Associate at I Tatti (from 2019).
Ludovica is an associate member of the international projects Metapolis (I Tatti) and Florentia Illustrata, a multi-institutional research on digital Renaissance Florence. She has been a member of the collaborative initiative Visualizing Venice/Visualizing Cities since 2011 (University of Padua and Duke University) and has worked as assistant curator on three international exhibitions on early modern Venetian history displayed at the Ducal Palace (Acqua e cibo a Venezia, 2015 and Venice, the Jews, and Europe, 2016) and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke (A Portrait of Venice: Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of 1500, 2017).
She serves on the editorial board of the journal Architectural Histories (EAHN) and is a member of the AISU International (Italian Association of Urban History) and the international association Via Querinissima, from myth to history.
Ludovica has published extensively on the relationship between architecture, urban studies and the wide-ranging issue of place-making processes. Her publications include the monograph Venezia e i margini urbani. L’insula dei Gesuiti in età moderna (IVSLA 2018) and the co-edited volume Acqua e cibo a Venezia. Storie della laguna e della città (Marsilio 2015).

Art historian

Sara Danese holds a degree in Art History from the Department of Cultural Heritage at the Università degli Studi di Padova, where she also completed a specialisation program in historical and artistic heritage. She further expanded her expertise with training in the legal aspects of cultural heritage through the university’s Department of Public, International, and European Law, and earned a Master’s in Strategies for UNESCO Site Promotion from the Treccani Academy. Sara has contributed her skills to the Export Office of the Superintendence for Verona, Vicenza, and Rovigo, and worked with the Cultural and Organisational Secretariat of the International Center for the Study of Architecture Andrea Palladio (Palladio Museum, Vicenza). Her research focuses on sixteenth-century Venetian painting, and she is an experienced Content Creator for multimedia applications in the cultural sector. Notable projects include developing the official app for the UNESCO candidacy of Padova Urbs Picta and the Ospiti in Villa Bassi app for the Civic Museum of Villa Bassi Rathgeb in Abano Terme (Padua).

Digital survey and HGIS specialist

Gianlorenzo Dellabartola is a Research Fellow in drawing and representation of architecture at the Department of Cultural Heritage (DBC) at the Università degli Studi di Padova within
the ERC project VeNiss. His expertise is in designing and carrying out digital surveys to create databases useful for the elaboration of GIS systems and interoperable 3D models for the historical architectural and landscape heritage. He graduated in Architecture with the highest grades and honors at the Università degli Studi di Firenze in 2021 with a thesis entitled The Representation for the Critical Interpretation of Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s Military Architecture – The Drawings of the Fortifications in the Ashburnham Codex 361. From 2019 he has been collaborating as a tutor at the Laboratory of Architectural Survey in the Department of Architecture in Florence.
Gianlorenzo participated in numerous research projects at the national level and his studies have mainly focused on digital documentation and two- and three-dimensional representation of architectural heritage for its conservation and enhancement. In particular, he focused on fortified architecture between the 15th and 16th centuries, with a special focus on the study of typologies and treaties of early modern military buildings.

Architectural and art historian

Before joining VeNiss in February 2023, Simone Fatuzzo obtained a PhD in Art History at the Università degli Studi di Padova (2017) with a thesis about the patronage of the Pallavicino family in Cortemaggiore, near Piacenza. In 2018 he won the Roberta Morelli Award for young scholars of Urban History awarded by the AISU International (Italian Association of Urban History) for a study entitled La famiglia Pallavicino a Cortemaggiore. Storia, architettura, documenti. In 2018 he held a Postdoctoral Research fellowship in the same institution, financed by a SID Project, focused on the study of the Noble Palaces of Padua now owned by the Università degli Studi di Padova. In 2019 he obtained the diploma from the Scuola di Archivistica, Paleografia e Diplomatica at the Venice State Archives. In 2020 he held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship about the Palazzo dei Pio a Carpi between the 14th and 16th centuries. Meanwhile, he collaborated with the Museo di Palazzo dei Pio for the exhibition focusing on the Church of San Nicolò di Carpi (2021). His previous research, moving between History of Art and of Architecture, focused on the patronage of the small Renaissance courts in Northern Italy (in particular Emilia Romagna and Lombardia), and on the noble palaces of Venice and Padua as well as Venetian villas in the early modern period.

Representation and HBIM modelling specialist

Luca Galloni is a civil engineer with a master’s degree in Building Engineering-Architecture from the Università degli Studi di Padova. Since 2020, he has specialised in the digitalisation of the built environment through BIM methodology. His career began with the creation of “As-Is” models of historic Italian heritage buildings and “As-Built” models for new constructions. In 2021, Luca expanded his scope by collaborating with leading national and international companies, where he managed and coordinated multidisciplinary teams focused on the digitalisation and design of heritage buildings, hospitals and infrastructures. By 2023, Luca took on full responsibility for managing and coordinating the BIM department at his current company. In this role, he implemented streamlined workflows, trained both internal and external teams, and spearheaded innovation in BIM practices.Luca is certified as a BIM Manager and as a BIM certification examiner for Bureau Veritas. His professional interests are deeply rooted in the AECO sector, particularly in the digitalisation and management of the built environment using data collection, advanced sensor technologies, mathematical modelling and artificial intelligence. Driven by a passion for innovation, Luca is committed to transforming how the built environment is understood, designed, and managed. 

Architectural and art historian

Martina Massaro is an art and architectural historian specialised in the modern period. She studied in Venice at the Università Ca’ Foscari with Lionello Puppi and then, under the guidance of Donatella Calabi, she obtained her PhD in History of the Arts at the Graduate School Ca’ Foscari-Iuav (2010-2013) with a thesis on the Treves family’s patronage. Afterwards, she has been a Research Fellow at the Università Iuav in Venice until 2016 and from 2017 at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (ICEA) at the Università degli Studi di Padova. Since 2013, she has been a member of the international research group Visualizing Venice/Visualizing Cities in collaboration with Duke University and, since 2020, she has been Visiting Professor in History of Architecture in Yaoundé at the National Advanced School of Public Works of the Republic of Cameroon. In 2016, the results of her research were awarded with the Pompeo Molmenti prize of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. Between 2021 and 2022 she collaborated with the Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea on the MIC’s Censimento dell’architettura del Secondo ‘900. Since 2022, she has collaborated with CASVA in Milan for the study and description of the archives of Studio MID, of Bela Angelus and Mario Salvadè. Her studies focus on 19th- and 20th-century patronage between art and architecture with a specific interest in the history of gardens, Jewish commissions, and their crucial role in the Venetian social and economic history.

Representation and HBIM modelling specialist

Federico Panarotto is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Cultural Heritage (DBC) at the Università degli Studi di Padova within the ERC project VeNiss. He obtained his PhD in Civil Engineering from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (ICEA) at the Università degli Studi di Padova in 2021 with a thesis entitled BIM and Topology Optimization. Practices, information exchange and new experimental studies. His main research field is the Building Information Modeling (BIM) with a particular reference to cultural heritage. He has focused on this topic for many years, participating as a Research Fellow in several projects from 2014 to 2018 and, then, from 2021 to the present. During this period, he published many articles related to the use of information based digital reconstruction, often focusing on specific applications such as scan-to-BIM. These topics are also integrated in his teaching activity in the courses “BIM modelling in the AEC industry” and “Computational drawing lab (CAD-BIM)” offered in the same department. He also participated in the content development of several exhibitions including Venice, the Jews, and Europe displayed at the Ducal Palace in Venice (2016) and The Tower of Carpi. Work in progress organised in Carpi (2019).

Architectural historian

Costanza Scarpa is a PhD candidate in Architectural History within the ERC VeNiss project. Previously, she was a Research Fellow at the Department of Cultural Heritage (DBC) at the Università degli Studi di Padova, working on the project Paesaggi di carta in trasformazione: dall’archivio al turismo cultuale sostenibile (2024), which focuses on the cartography of the lagoon territory during the modern age. In March 2024, she completed her studies at the Scuola di Specializzazione in Beni Storico-Artistici at the Università degli Studi di Padova, presenting a thesis entitled Da dimora nobiliare a sede universitaria: palazzo Sala a Padova. At the same university, she also obtained her Master’s degree in History of Art in 2021 with a thesis titled Villa Contarini a Piazzola sul Brenta: da dimora palladiana a ‘reggia barocca’. Her research interests center on architectural history, particularly the villas of the Veneto region, a topic she has been exploring since her undergraduate studies, examining their cultural, architectural, and artistic aspects. Recently, her work has concentrated on Villa Revedin Bolasco in Castelfranco Veneto, as well as Palazzo Revedin and Palazzo Sala in Padua, topics on which she has published several articles.