The activity of primary LCA data collection on local building materials within the "Genius Loci" research program, aimed at supporting the environmental assessment of 'pilot' construction and refurbishment projects, increased knowledge on locally available products but also represented an opportunity to experiment with the operational phase of LC inventory and reflect on implications. The article discusses some issues emerged, such as unavoidable lacks in data and context-related problems, together with the results obtained.

L'ingente patrimonio culturale italiano affronta oggi le conseguenze di strategie di promozione obsolete e di un insufficiente uso delle ICT, ma soprattutto di una errata percezione del suo significato nella vita delle comunità. I caratteri stessi del c.d. 'Museo Italia'(un patrimonio di beni 'minori' fortemente diffuso sul territorio accanto ai più noti beni monumentali) richiedono notevoli cambiamenti nei progetti di promozione sia nel senso di un trasferimento alla scala locale dei processi, sia nella identificazione e modellazione dell'utenza potenziale. Sul piano operativo ciò implica il ricorso a strumenti tecnologici semplici e fortemente interattivi, incentrati sui bisogni di informazione dell'utente medio, potenziale visitatore. L'articolo illustra il sistema sviluppato da ITC-CNR (Bari) nell'ambito del progetto 'Smart Cities' per la città di Siracusa, basato su procedure e software che semplificano la pubblicazione di informazione georeferenziata.

Territorial marketing of local heritages - VirtualTour+ - The local dimension of territorial development processes through the lever of cultural tourism is an essential prerequisite in actions and strategies. This perspective highlights, at the level of technological response, the need for solutions expressly tailored on the specific features and needs of municipal governances. VirtualTour+ aims at exploring and exploiting immersive environments' unexpressed potentialities.

ICTs represent strategic resources for Cultural Heritage (CH) projects. Anyway, several conditions put the success of promotion projects at risk, especially if carried out at the local level. Firstly, local scale amplifies the weight of budget constraints on the priorities of public administrations, compelled to allocate funds to the physical conservation of heritage rather than to software and training. Secondly, proprietary SW, often sophisticated and complex in procedures, fails to integrate precious unformalized knowledge from local stakeholders and communities, particularly in the field of cultural tourism. Finally, a changing demand for cultural tourism, with potential visitors frequently searching for information directly on the Web before moving, requires a higher interactivity in tools and systems. The paper illustrates the work carried out at the Construction Technologies Institute for delivering procedures and SW specifically designed to simplify the publication of geo-referenced information and reduce the need for specialized skills and equipments. The described results were achieved along different research programs focusing on the Albanian CH with a learning-by-doing approach.

Remote fruition of architectures can be enhanced by using virtual tours more effectively. This technology suffers from a lack of information about context and objects; our usercentered approach described in this paper attempt to make progress in this direction to deliver virtual tours as a powerful, active learning tool to enhance understanding of monuments and sites, especially those with limited physical accessibility. First, a description of the basic principles, goals and methodological approach is presented. After a reflection on the potentiality of multimedia, web technologies and hypermedia in cultural heritage promotion, an experience in education & training is described in detail, focusing on technologies, learning approach and final products of the course programme. First results of a work in progress - capacity building in Srebrenica, Bosnia - close the paper.

Energy performance improvement is a major strategy in the built environment's whole quality enhancement. Despite the large availability of proven technologies and the recent financial support measures, several variables make a case-tailored selection of options a puzzling task, abdicated in favour of routine solutions. The articles gives a brief description of a methodological frame to support the preliminary stages of design for multi-criteria informed decisions.

Albania represents an interesting case of a newly emerging destination in the international tourist market, with intensive pressures coming from seasonal visit flows and the related impacts on the environment. The Albanian Culture Marketing Strategy, while correctly focusing on heritage for the de-seasoning of visits in congested areas and for awareness-raising about the country's cultural identity among tourists and residents, presents some limitations in the definition of application patterns and concrete solutions. In particular, the active contribution of potential users, of ICTs and, in particular, the potentialities of widespread tools such as mobile apps seem to be overlooked. In this article, the current scenario of the Albanian tourism sector, with particular emphasis on the cultural segment, is presented through a detailed analysis of relevant program documents in order to outline strengths and weaknesses of the underlying approach. Then, the potential contribution of mobile apps to the sustainable development of destinations are analyzed and the market of available technologies is presented through a taxonomy of a consistent number of representative cases. Finally, the SOS-Tirana app is presented and its adequateness to the context is discussed.

The validation of the operational tools, developed by ITC-CNR within the 'Genius Loci' research program (recently concluded), on two IACP public housing case studies in Bari gave the possibility of experimenting with the "papery handbook" as a support for energy-efficient and environmentally compatible design, with a particular focus on heating systems and alternative energy production devices as well as on local building materials.