SUMMARY
Conservation of heritage cities is an extremely complex intervention, encompassing a range of different scales: from the urban fabricarticulation, to the rules generating different types of buildings, from the architecture of traditional buildings, to the materiality of their recurrent elements, firmly rooted in local construction and materials. In the 1990s, some Italian heritage cities undertook the initiative to produce Conservation Handbooks. These were illustrated documents, offering practical solutions on the construction and restauration techniques, typical of a specific place. In fact, such handbooks were tailored on the specific site, included exemplar buildings accurately chosen to represent recurrent typologies, and contributed to raise awareness and sense of pride in locals. Current digital technologies such as Heritage Building Information Modelling, H-BIM, are suitable to develop libraries of parametric digitalobjects which could replace traditional handbooks, therefore renamed Conservation Handbook 4.0. This proposal has been tested in an extant case study, by developing H-BIM object, and discussed with a variety of stakeholders and experts to confirm its potential applicability.