Case Study: Politecnico di Milano achieves IoT-based remote preservation of Roman ruins with Microsoft Azure

Politecnico di Milano - Customer Case Study

Politecnico di Milano, a leading technical university in Italy, was asked to help monitor the Mitreo, an ancient subterranean site beneath Rome’s Circus Maximus, where limited physical access prevented archaeologists from assessing damage to friezes and sculptures. With a small research team and a need for a simple, scalable system that required minimal custom engineering, the university sought an out‑of‑the‑box IoT solution to track humidity, temperature, soil moisture, CO2 and movement.

The team deployed embedded sensors and a field gateway to send compact telemetry to Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, then used Azure Stream Analytics and Azure SQL Database to process and store data, with Azure App Service and Power BI providing web-based visualizations. The system revealed dangerously high humidity and poor ventilation—prompting plans for improved airflow—and proved low‑cost, easy to scale and reusable for other archaeological sites, enabling archaeologists to monitor conditions directly without heavy IT support.

Politecnico di Milano

Luca Mottola

Associate Professor