Interpreting Urban Heritage in the Digital Age: Semiotic Approaches to Representation

Starting from a semiotic understanding of the city as a stratified and continuously rewritten palimpsest, this paper investigates the relationship between urban heritage, graphic representation, and cultural translation within the current digital scenario. The study introduces and develops a theoretical framework, the “translation triangle” (TT), articulated around three mutually co-determining domains: the cognitive, concerned with the critical identification of relevant signs within the urban text; the technical–digital, concerned with their formalisation through survey instruments, three-dimensional modelling, and visualisation pipelines; and the socio-anthropological, concerned with the mediation of translated content towards its recipient. The framework is tested through two urban contexts: Pavia, Italy, and Gdańsk, Poland, different in scale and research advancement. Both demonstrate that the quality of urban heritage representation depends not solely on geometric accuracy or visual effectiveness, but on the capacity to make explicit the interpretative choices embedded in each translational act and to produce forms of knowledge that are comprehensible, interrogable, and culturally shareable. The paper concludes that every digital representation of urban heritage constitutes a semiotic act, not a neutral technical operation, and that the future of the discipline lies in constructing translations that are conscious, verifiable, and culturally grounded, capable of preserving the historical meaning of heritage without reducing it to spectacle or data infrastructure.