Conservazione, restauro, rigenerazione, riciclo. Una questione di termini

The history of restoration in Italy has been marked by terms playing a role in the evolution of the discipline, as key words, stated by leading figures in some crucial moments of the debate, which were subsequently assimilated by the main official documents and that finally caught on, as terms of the common technical speech. Starting from the “traditional” juxtaposition restoration-preservation by Boito, whereby the terms became the two polar opposites of a long lasting dialectics about both the purposes and the concepts or operational criteria. Some more words, such as architectural and urban regeneration and recycle, or a renewed idea of re-use, have been recently spread, following the expansion – both in the qualitative and quantitative field – of the object of preservation, reflecting a more complex approach to our past and providing restoration with new perspectives – and boundaries –, first of all toward interdisciplinarity. Far from aiming for a kind of taxonomy, this paper would contribute to a theoretical reflection about both the meanings and the entailments of some of these keywords, with some operational references to verify their actual pertinence in the field of restoration, as well as the possible drifts.