Recovering Sicilian Silk Heritage through Digital Technologies: The Case of Piraino's Collection

Textile conservation has given rise to small and medium-sized museums, usually with scarce resources. In Sicily, the little evidence that remains of silk production and opulent imports by the rich and powerful local aristocracy is kept in museums, parishes, and other cultural institutions. The documentation, dissemination, and enhancement of such a fragile heritage is today possible by means of technological tools that provide novel means to preserve, analyze, and exploit digital information. In this paper, we present some outcomes of the SILKNOW project, a project that applies computing research to the needs of diverse users (museums, educational institutions, the tourism industry, creative industries, media, etc.) and preserves the tangible and intangible heritage associated with silk. We show the methodology followed to build end users' needs into the Virtual Loom, a tool that deals with the 3D reconstruction of silk fabrics at the yarn level. We also provide a real example of how to integrate it at the museum level, specifically, at Piraino's Collection. The results demonstrate how small and medium-sized museums can access tools that will help them to carry out their daily tasks

The enhanced x-ray timing and polarimetry mission – eXTP: an update on its scientific cases, mission profile and development status

The enhanced x-ray timing and polarimetry mission (eXTP) is a flagship observatory for x-ray timing, spectroscopy and polarimetry developed by an international consortium. Thanks to its very large collecting area, good spectral resolution and unprecedented polarimetry capabilities, eXTP will explore the properties of matter and the propagation of light in the most extreme conditions found in the universe. eXTP will, in addition, be a powerful x-ray observatory. The mission will continuously monitor the x-ray sky, and will enable multi-wavelength and multi-messenger studies. The mission is currently in phase B, which will be completed in the middle of 2022