The tree-lined avenue that opens onto the main building comes to life on the screen and gives a preview of the visit to the estate. The quiet of the Tuscan countryside almost seems to cross the border of the monitor and in a moment you are already there. This is the power of the digital dimension, which is now at home in Villa Grazianella. Thanks to a collaboration with Simone Castelli's "Fairsgate" company, the elegant Fattoria del Cerro Relais is now at the center of a special tour that goes beyond virtuality and aims to accompany visitors in an extremely vivid space, engaging and immersive. A curiosity: all of this is made possible by a technology normally used in the aerospace and automotive sectors, the same one that made it possible to create the digital tour of the archaeological site of Abu Simbel, in Egypt. How was the project carried out and for what purposes? We just have to immerse ourselves in this new dimension and go to discover it directly on the field together with Simone Castelli.
When technology enhances experience
Taking a tour of Villa Grazianella thanks to the new digital tour really means living an extremely realistic experience of the structure and its environments and the secret of the technology that allows all this must be sought along the demarcation line between the concepts of digital and virtual. To explain it is Simone Castelli, who specifies: "Our work actually consists in the transposition of a physical space into the digital dimension, which is why technically the project that we have studied for the Fattoria del Cerro Relais is more precisely outlined as a "digital twin" of the structure: we have not built anything invented, but we have worked on reality, enhancing it in order to make it usable through an alternative mode. If we had opted for virtual technology, we would have operated in a completely different way, building the structure through lines of HTML code".
An approach that Castelli further clarifies through the description of the various work phases: “To achieve this result we spent an entire day on the Estate and carried out a laser scan of all the rooms using specific software. In this way we obtained about 200 scans which were then aligned and made interactive. On this basis we have created a type of processing which in technical jargon is defined as "overlay" and which has allowed us to superimpose a series of functional elements on the scanned images, such as for example the digital labels, which accompany the wines on sale in the Estate's shop".
“To do this - continues Simone Castelli - we have also created the digital twin of the winery, which allows access to the entire range of products signed by Tenute del Cerro: by positioning the cursor on the label associated with each bottle, one has the opportunity to reach the online store and access the sales channel".
Among the aspects on which the founder of "Fairsgate" emphasizes there is the possibility of following a multilingual and adaptive path: the tour is based on a system closely connected to the navigation browser, this allows him to detect the country from which the digital twin is activated and to upload the content in the corresponding language. A smart solution that enhances Villa Grazianella also in terms of international tourism".
Villa Grazianella: discovering the "digital twin"
Thanks to the new digital twin, the rooms of the Estate present themselves to the visitor in an extremely fluid and natural way. To activate the itinerary, simply click on the link inserted in the "Hospitality" section of the site. Once you enter the dedicated page, just select the destination of your tour using the drop-down menu that appears on the right side of the screen and the magic happens: the rooms and suites of the Relais are revealed to the eye, showing all the details vividly and engaging. But that's not all, because in addition to an exploratory tour of Villa Grazianella, it is possible to access the range of experiences offered in the structure, from visits to the cellar with tasting, to a picnic in the vineyard, passing through an e-bike ride in the vineyards and the cooking lessons.
The digital tour then offers a tempting view of the rich breakfast offered to guests of the estate and projects the visitor into the restaurant, where you can let yourself be tempted by the tasty dishes of traditional Tuscan cuisine created by chef Stefano Azzi.
The result is an innovative experience, a formula capable of describing the Estate in a direct and captivating way, as Simone Castelli points out: "Through the digital visit, the structure reaches the visitor with a message of total transparency and openness, an which allows you to further enhance the concept of hospitality of Villa Grazianella. It is an extremely intuitive, dynamic and above all immersive solution: the digital visitor is able to move fluidly in the space and discover the Relais even before having visited it".
At Fattoria del Cerro the Italian lifestyle intertwines physical place and digital space
The new digital look of Villa Grazianella, therefore, is strongly based on technological experience, but at the same time maintains the relationship with the physical place, the starting point of the digitization work and landing place for the visit made by PC or smartphone. From this point of view, the two dimensions, the physical and the digital, meet halfway in a third space which today is defined as phigital and which integrates the experience and services made available by a commercial activity or a physical accommodation facility, with the full range of solutions that the same business or facility offers online. "On the other hand - specifies the founder of "Fairsgate" - digital is a very powerful ally for tourist businesses that intend to present themselves to the world and even if there is no possibility that it can replace the physical place, it is nonetheless becoming an experiential element very important". In this sense Villa Grazianella, thanks to the new technology offered by the digital twin, has reached this new dimension. “The beauty of the work carried out - finally underlines Castelli - was working in close contact with the culture of beauty, because the Cerro Estates embody precisely this and fully represent the Italian Lifestyle so loved all over the world: merging technology with the poetry of these places was the most exciting and satisfying thing".
For Villa Grazianella and for Tenute del Cerro the journey towards the future has already begun and proceeds along the digital path, an immersive and welcoming journey that offers a taste of the days to be lived in the structure: curious to try the experience?
