Ricerc@Sapienza

The Second Part of the work focuses on the restoration project. It includes the analysis and underpinning philosophy regarding the situation before and after the earthquake. It also includes a description of the damage together with the causes of this, as well as the critical decisions and issues related to the conservation project. These chapters give due consideration to the choices for the building consolidation and related improvement of the structure with respect to potential future seismic behavior. In depth analysis of the courtyard restoration due to damage by the 2009 earthquake, and damage during previous earthquakes is also a focus of these chapters. The underpinning philosophy resulted in a decision not to reconstruct the collapsed part as an exact replica of the original (“as it was and where it was”) but
to re-interpret the reconstruction in a way that made the intervention recognizable, whilst also achieving harmony with the various historical phases of the courtyard as studied through historical photographs. These photographs and related documentation revealed that the fifteenth century courtyard had undergone major changes over the centuries. The restoration carried out in the twentieth century (1947) attempted
to erase traces of previous intervention, disclosing the lack of cultural awareness at that time for the values of subsequent historical stratifications and, in particular, of the eighteenth-century renovation.