La conservazione attiva dell'edilizia pompeiana e il progetto di Restauro Architettonico della Casa delle Nozze d'Argento

Antonio Pugliano describes the entire planning process of the restoration of the Casa delle Nozze d’Argento starting with the analytical preliminaries concerning the urban sphere of Pompei and aspects of ancient building types, dwelling upon the technical study of building and compositional lexis of antiquity inferred from the Vitruvian treatise tradition and the catalogue findings documented in the excavation journals of the 19th and 20th centuries. The planning syntheses point to intervention proposals resulting from in-depth knowledge of the object and its original cultural and architectural context. Antonio Pugliano points out that the project concerns the architectural restoration of an object of an archaeological interest, thus stressing that the restoration initiatives concern what we have to do to preserve authentic material and what is useful to do if we wish to pass on to the future the architectural and cultural significance recognisable in the ruin, expressing it in a definitively intelligible form. The two above-mentioned intentions have been imposed by specific request of the clients (World Monument Fund - Kress Foundation, Soprintendenza di Pompei) who wish, as part of a more wide-ranging programme of enhancement of the ancient city of Pompei, to make of the Casa delle Nozze d’Argento a museum which will divulge those methods and qualities of constructing and inhabiting buildings which were typical of Pompeiian antiquity. The work proposed in the project will outline an architectural physiognomy which is more representative of the original context. This architectural physiognomy has been drawn from the examination of the hypotheses of A. Mau, pointing up the present-day situation and reflections on Vitruvian indications. The work will also constitute a renewal since the cement parts will be replaced with components which resemble those of antiquity, in terms of materials and techniques, so as to guarantee the best type-eloquence of reversibility, preservability and philological and mechanical fitness with respect to the ancient material structure which has to host them.