2021

The Quirinale Palace in Rome is one of the world’s most renowned heritage sites. Once home to popes it has been the official residence of the President of the Italian Republic since 1946. However, using the words of said President, Sergio Mattarella, the Quirinale Palace is also the “Home of All Italians”. This is due to its importance for Italian political and institutional life, as well as its incomparable artistic and cultural heritage, representing the genius and creativity of Italians.

Google is proud to join forces with the office of the Italian Head of the State to invite everyone — Italians and people from all over the world — to make this place their home. But you wouldn’t want to call somewhere you’d never visited before “home”, right? So, put on your fancy clothes and let’s open the doors of this house together, courtesy of Google Arts & Culture’s new online experience.

Entering the Palace

Welcome to the Quirinale Palace: let’s begin. Before entering, you will spy the Courtyard of Honor (Cortile d’Onore), a large arcaded square with a harmonious appearance, the result of decades of work and passion. From here, we might stroll up the noble Staircase of Honor (Scalone d’Onore) where you will have access to the main rooms in the building. Marvel at the immense spaces all around you, with ornate frescos and adornments at every turn.

Hallways full of unexpected items

Let’s continue down the halls and experience even more uniqueness. Art can be so original, especially when it finds a way to relate to every age and interest! For astrology lovers or those just curious to delve deeper into a particular artwork, these hallways are lined with decorations where you can find your zodiac sign among beautiful astrological images. In doing so, you can feel part of something greater, and imagine others doing the same centuries ago. This theme continues with the furnishings: leaning against the walls are twelve armchairs made at the beginning of the 18th century by Andrea Brustolon, an artist described as the “Michelangelo of wood” by the one and only Honoré de Balzac.

Next, keep walking down the halls and chambers and you will soon notice a certain love for clocks and pendulums. In fact, the Quirinale Palace holds over 200 of them! Time really is a precious commodity and you won’t be able to forget it in this place. Home to hand made clocks and pendulums imported from all over the world, you can explore how they are cared for and repaired in the watchmaker’s laboratory. Get your clocks right by learning about how “telling time” has changed and trended in history.

The office where it all happens

Here we are. The moment has come to hop into the President’s office (no pictures with flash, please!) and uncover all the details that he works next to as he performs his duties, attends functions, and receives foreign guests and members of Parliament. Few know that, originally, when the Quirinale Palace was the seat of the Vatican, the lavishing room was the Pope’s summer bedroom. During the Napoleonic restyling, it was used as the emperor’s dining room and at the end of the 19th century, King Umberto I turned it into an office that linked to the bedroom in the adjoining Sala di Druso (Room of Drusus the Elder).

They’re only human

It was an eclectic group of people who lived — and live — in this Palace over the years. Here is one such example: the Savoy family, and other former habitants, used the Great Hall of the Cuirassiers, the largest of the rooms, as an indoor tennis court. At a point in time, it was also used as a skating rink for the entertainment of the Savoy princes. Which explains why, during some recent restorations, a tennis ball was found behind the tympanum (decorative arch) that tops the access portal of the Pauline Chapel, a space dedicated to Pope Paul V, who commissioned this and other large rooms at the South of the Palace.

A love for nature and its fruits

Last but not least, you will arrive at the beautiful outdoor gardens which you can also see through the Street View technology on Google Arts & Culture. You can also see the Porta Giardini, a nineteenth-century gate entering the Viale delle Palmen, bordered on both sides by twelve geometric flower beds with a rare and rich collection of tree species.

Your trip to the Quirinale Palace doesn’t end here! Browse over 1000 images, photoshoots of 13 artworks through Art Camera and more than 100 km of Street View digitizations in the Palace and President’s summer location in the woods, Castelporziano Residence.

Visit g.co/quirinale, or download Google Arts & Culture’s Android or iOS app to continue learning and having fun. And if this exhibition got you in the mood to see more of Italy and its beauties, embark on our other online experiences, such as a trip to Parma Capital of Culture 2020+21 .

In the summer, Dr. Gino Caspari’s day starts at 5:30 a.m. in Siberia, where he studies the ancient Scythians with the Swiss National Science Foundation. There, he looks for burial places of these nomadic warriors who rode through Asia 2,500 years ago. The work isn’t easy, from dealing with extreme temperatures, to swamps covered with mosquitos. But the biggest challenge is staying one step ahead of tomb raiders.

It’s believed that more than 90% of the tombs — called kurgans — have already been destroyed by raiders looking to profit off what they find, but Gino is looking for the thousands he believes remain scattered across Russia, Mongolia and Western China. To track his progress, he began mapping these burial sites using Google Earth. “There’s a plethora of open data sources out there, but most of them don’t have the resolution necessary to detect individual archaeological structures,” Dr. Caspari says, pointing out that getting quality data is also very expensive. “Google Earth updates high-res data across the globe, and, especially in remote regions, it was a windfall for archaeologists. Google Earth expanded our possibilities to plan surveys and understand cultural heritage on a broader geographic scale.”

While Google Earth helped Dr. Caspari plan his expeditions, he still couldn’t stay ahead of the looters. He needed to get there faster. That’s when he met data scientist Pablo Crespo and started using another Google tool, TensorFlow.

“Since I started my PhD in 2013, I have been interested in automatic detection of archaeological sites from remote sensing data,” Gino says. “It was clear we needed to look at landscapes and human environmental interaction to understand past cultures. The problem was that our view was obscured by a lack of data and a focus on individual sites.” Back then, he tried some simple automatization processes to detect the places he needed for his research with the available technology, but only got limited results. In 2020, though, Gino and Pablo created a machine learning model using TensorFlow that could analyze satellite images they pulled from Google Earth. This model would look for places on the images that had the characteristics of a Scythian tomb.

This technology sped up the discovery process for Gino, giving him an advantage over looters and even deterioration caused by climate change.

“Frankly, I think that without these tools, I probably wouldn’t have gotten this far in my understanding of technology and what it can do to make a difference in the study of our shared human past,” Gino says. “As a young scholar, I just lack the funds to access a lot of the resources I need. Working with Pablo and others has widened my perspective on what is possible and where we can go.”

Technology solutions have given Dr. Caspari’s work a new set of capabilities, supercharging what he’s able to do. And it’s also made him appreciate the importance of the human touch. “The deeper we dive into our past with the help of technology, the more apparent it becomes how patchy and incomplete our knowledge really is,” he says. “Technology often serves as an extension of our senses and mitigates our reality. Weaving the fabric of our reality will remain the task of the storyteller in us.”