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Since the 1950s, Italian architectural scholarship has gifted the world two things: studies on the history and morphology of the urban setting, and accounts of the history of monument restoration – two closely related subjects. In fact, it was largely thanks to two great art historians – Giulio Carlo Argan and Cesare Brandi – that Italy’s National Restoration Institute was found in 1939. The moment was a propitious one with numerous art historians coming to the fore in Italy: Argan and Brandi but also Adolfo Venturi, his son Lionello, Roberto Longhi, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Matteo Marangoni, and later on, Federico Zeri. Together, they formed a veritable parterre de rois that for many years to come placed Italy at the center of international art history and criticism, and which would subsequently be extended to include architecture, especially thanks to architects like Bruno Zevi and Manfredo Tafuri. In fact, the National Restoration Institute covered the restoration of both works of art and architecture. These, however, entail two completely different types of intervention. While works of art come down to us in large measure as they were conceived and created by their author, works of architecture are living entities that undergo several changes from the time they are first conceived and constructed down to the moment when we first come across them. Although we are facilitated in the restoration of a building by Palladio, for example, since we either have the original plans or are able to fairly accurately reconstruct the original form, things become more complicated in the case of spontaneous architecture, such as medieval buildings and objects. A first significant theoretical contribution to the philosophy of restoration came from Brandi and Argan. They were the first to define restoration as an activity aiming not just to preserve single monuments but rather to recover our broader built heritage, including the spontaneous...
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