Sociologist

Restoration of handiwork, restoration of a city

Longanesi said that Italians prefer unveiling rather than maintaining. After all it is not true that this habit belongs to Italians. In Vienna I saw the famous sanatorium of Hoffmann in a disastrous state; in Versailles the renowned La Sala della Pallacorda (Tennis-Court Hall) remained for years in indescribable conditions. Italy is an ancient nation and it is full of monuments, however, fortunately, it is afflicted by an inferiority complex. Today it would not repeat either the lacerations done by Barberini to the Pantheon, or the demolition for the creation of Via dei Fori Imperiali or Via della Conciliazione.
Our current approach towards conservation and restoration is influenced positively by an organizational episode unique in its kind: the creation of the Central Restoration Institute.

Between July 4 and 6 in 1938, in Borromini’s Roman Oratory, the then Minister of Education Giuseppe Bottai organized a congress of the Superintendences of Fine Arts and Ancient History. This is an excerpt of the report: “There is much talking today about restoration. Science has made its newest and most powerful means available to our desire for knowledge. Now in Italy there is a great tradition of restoration: the skilfulness and the sensibility of our restorers still obtain many victories against the complexity of the scientific instruments of the best European and American restoration
institutes. However, it is necessary that that traditional skilfulness and the innate sensibility are effectively sustained by a strong scientific research; and that a coordination centre gathers and evaluates all of the single experiences from which a generally effective experience is reaped, in addition to a concrete, long-lasting learning lesson”.
Two young collaborators of Bottai – Giulio Carlo Argan and Cesare Brandi – elaborated the concrete project of the “coordination centre”, that is the Central Restoration Institute, separated from the single museums and with organizational autonomy.

The tasks that were assigned to the Institute ranged from the direct execution of the restorations to consultancy, from technical-scientific investigation to the conservation of the Central Archives, from the development of a periodical bulletin to the organization of a school of specialization. The means to develop these targets went from the workshops to the physical, chemical and radiological cabinets, from the archives to the photograph library and libraries.
Just one year was sufficient to develop the project and translate it into law. Another year was enough to find the location of the Institute. A third year was sufficient to set everything up and have it inaugurated.
The original characteristics of the Institute consisted in the priority given to team-work, in the energy that was put in Domenico De Masi Sociologist to develop the restoration school, in the interdisciplinary, inter-professional aspects of the group. Furthermore, in
the ability to network with external experts and with similar institutions, with a participative leadership style, in an equilibrium of roles, tasks and structures, in the effort to conciliate individuality to the community, the knowledge of handicraft to scientific knowledge, theory to manual work, rationality to passion, local knowledge to international knowledge, public to private, internal resources to external resources.
The same criteria adopted by the Institute for the restoration of single works of art have become with time inevitable for the maintenance of those enormous handiworks that are the cities.

Cities are an invention of man: to create a protection against enemies, to facilitate communication between inhabitants, to produce and exchange goods, to shorten as much as possible the distance from the place of work to the living centres, to have medical infrastructure and structures of leisure.
Before industrialization, cities were mostly places of consumption for agricultural products that came from the outskirts and bureaucratic production places: paper work of officers and lawyers, academics and notaries. The industries took on an important role, next to the cathedral and the town hall, giving the city a role of producer of material goods: factories like Bicocca in Milan or the Lingotto of Turin, initially located in the outskirts, forced the duty boundaries to expand encompassing the new neighbourhoods of the workers.

Industries – noisy, expensive, pollutant – moved with time to more remote areas (from Brindisi to Pomigliano d’Arco, from Gela to Cassino and Melfi) and even to the third-world countries, making vast areas available to be reconverted into concert halls, exposition buildings, international exhibition centres. In this way the city underwent a third transformation: from a place of consumption to a place of production, and at last a place of transition. Gottmann, who was the first one to study this phenomenon,
talks about a “transactional city”, that is a place by now in which mostly what occurs are transactions, exchange of information, meetings, congresses, great political and commercial meetings, mass information, and cultural, religious and professional tourism.
Therefore, restoration comes into action massively with the double scope of maintaining the single monuments but also adapting buildings, roads, public places to the new tasks that the city has, from an industrial to a postindustrial era.

Domenico De Masi