Resistivity Tomography in the Park of Pratolino at Vaglia (Florence, Italy)

Within this article are the results of a geoelectrical survey performed in the park of Pratolino at Vaglia (Florence, Italy), using the multiple dipole-dipole profile technique. The purpose was to outline the location of the main body of the ancient Villa Medici di Pratolino, of which only a separate building, now known as Villa Demidoff, is visible in its full splendour. The three-dimensional probability-based electrical resistivity tomography inversion (PERTI) approach has been adopted. The three-dimensional resistivity tomography inversion provides evidence at the expected depth of burial of a regular pattern of resistivity relative maxima, mostly distributed along the sides of a mesh closely resembling the structural plan of a building. The almost perfect superposition of the high resistivity source image over an official historical plan of the ancient Villa Medici has allowed the regular mesh of the resistivity maxima to be ascribed to remains of walls. As the Pratolino case-history is one of the first applications of the PERTI algorithm to real field datasets, its performance has been tested using the well-known ERTLab commercial software as a benchmark. The comparison has shown a very good agreement between the two inversions and also confirmed the much higher computing speed and greater versatility of the PERTI algorithm, as outlined in a previous paper where only synthetic models were tested. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.