Venezia 1964: nascita di una disciplina

A document with a real and powerful international scope, a hitherto unprecedented reflection on the criteria and principles of restoration and conservation, a message shared by theorists and operators who were coming to terms with unprecedented forms of devastation and degradation, but also with associated life, new techniques and professionalism, and the possibility and need for sharing without cultural as well as truly physical and political borders. With the Venice Charter the necessity of restoration as a discipline is posed, an emanation of shared norms and rules between training and operativity that in an evolving form generates updates, research, specificity, professionalism, above all projects hopefully capable, after sixty years, of solid adherences but also of distances and differences from the founding rules from which it comes. Without such rules and in the absence of an awareness of their mandate, there would in fact be no historical sense of critical reason, of the very necessity of the overcoming that contains History, hence of both the continuity and the significant discontinuities between past and present that nourish conservation and restoration, the continually variable conditions of the material care of the architectural heritage through the restoration project, which is a project of architecture and without the restoration that is a project.