Bruno Zanardi

Giotto at the airport? The real issue is our relationship with heritage

I am asked by "Finestre Sull'Arte" for an opinion on the display at Fiumicino airport of three large panels of the stained-glass window that originally stood at the end of the right aisle of the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. Erratic panels tha...
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The restoration of the Basilica Ulpia? Not exactly exciting

Much is being said these days about the completion of the work by which a small part of the colonnade of the Basilica Ulpia that had been lying on the ground for centuries and centuries in the area of the Imperial Fora in Rome and the steps behind it...
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Attilio Bertolucci face-to-face with Correggio's frescoes

I present here a semi-ignored documentary by Giuseppe Bertolucci about Father Attilio's visit to Correggio's dome in the abbey church of San Giovanni, Parma during the work I carried out in reviewing the restoration of the frescoes carried out betwee...
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More on the Garisenda: the affair would never have arisen if...

An article appeared these days in the Bolognese newspaper "Il Resto del Carlino" documenting the care devoted as early as the nineteenth century to the thousand-year-old Garisenda Tower, a symbol of the city, which today is said to be in danger of co...
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On the problem of the Garisenda tower. Bruno Zanardi's point of view

For Giorgio Macchi, sit tibi terra levis For some months now in Bologna there has been a fear that the Garisenda municipal tower, one of the symbols of the city, may collapse. This is a complex and serious problem about which there are many things t...
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A fourteenth-century convent for sale in Cagli. What will become of it?

Cagli, in the Marche region, is one of the Italian cities of art called "minor," but which are not such. It is in fact a beautiful city, made so also by the urban redevelopment and restoration, that is, valorization, carried out in recent years by th...
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Andrea Carandini and the problems of artistic heritage protection

A long article written by one of Italy's best known and most important archaeologists, Andrea Carandini, came out a few days ago in Corriere della Sera. A text that deals with a topic of decisive importance for Italy and Italians, but despite this le...
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The birth of modern critical restoration. Longhi's 1948 polemic against Brandi.

Why is it that the Central Institute for Restoration, which since 1941 of its inauguration has been an undisputed point of reference in the entire world about conservation and restoration, in Italy has had to conduct its research work in the substant...
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What needs to be done before deciding whether to put a shrine around the Trajan Column

In the margin of thearticle in which I wished to protect Trajan's Column with a shrine I receive letters from some archaeological friends all opposing this hypothesis. I then think it useful to make some clarifications regarding that writing of mine....
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Old towns and contemporary architecture. A 1992 conversation with Renzo Piano

This interview was published in November 1993 in Il Giornale dell'Arte. I meet Renzo Piano in his city studio in the heart of Genoa. It is a buzzing beehive of busy people from whose windows one can see the Romanesque black-and-white horizontally sl...
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Looking at restoration from the 1950s to the present. A conversation with Giorgio Torraca

I telephone Giorgio Torraca in his studio a stone's throw from Piazza Navona. I ask him to tell me about the volume Problems of Conservation, published in 1973 edited by Giovanni Urbani . Problems of Conservation can in fact be considered the startin...
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A note in the margin of Silvia Cecchini's volume on Leonardo's Last Supper.

Impeccable narrative, that of the restoration of Leonardo's Last Supper, which Silvia Cecchini has published in the 333 pages, a fateful number, of her Building on Rubble, the same number of pages as a much-talked-about book that came out a few years...
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A lesson from Roberto Longhi. Attilio Bertolucci talks about the art historian in private

Attilio Bertolucci (San Prospero Parmense, 1911 - Rome, 2000) is one of the greatest Italian poets and also one of the most reliable witnesses of the culture of our twentieth century. But he is so without conceit and declares the masters to whom he o...
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Restoration, conservation and protection of artistic heritage. A conversation with Giovanni Urbani

The aspect of Giovanni Urbani that most continues to strike me, his former student at the Central Institute for Restoration (icr), is that of the admittedly singular and certainly not happy fate of being a "great outsider." A condition that led him t...
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An unpublished letter from Roberto Longhi to the principal of Liceo Tasso in Rome

We often read that between 1912 and 1914 Roberto Longhi taught art history at the Visconti High School, which is still based in the same square as the Jesuit Collegio Romano where the Ministry of Cultural Heritage is located, and at the Liceo Tasso i...
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Protection and art history. A conversation with Federico Zeri

August 1996. Federico Zeri's house in the countryside of Mentana, near Rome, appears as an extraordinary fortress within which the scholar enclosed himself to fight a personal war against the gloom of the times. A most faithful mirror of his omnivoro...
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"My Friendship with Giovanni Urbani. A dialogue with Raffaele La Capria

To remember the great writer Raffaele La Capria, who died last June 26 in Rome at the age of 99, we publish this interview with La Capria, given in 2008 to Bruno Zanardi, about the long friendship that had united La Capria and Giovanni Urbani. ...
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