Centro e periferie della tutela negli anni Settanta. Sabino Iusco soprintendente in Basilicata (1971-1977)

In July 1971, Sabino Iusco (1922-2013) was called from Cagliari to direct the newly established Superintendency of the Basilicata Galleries. Taking the reins of a structure that at that time was not even two weeks old, in little more than five years he wrote a found- ing chapter in the history of knowledge and protection of the Lucanian artistic heritage, building from the foundations the entire administrative architecture of the institute he was called to manage and initiating a sweeping reconnaissance that penetrated a territory that until then had remained almost impermeable to any outside view. Together with his wife Anna Grelle, he was the director of a very delicate operation of redemption for the region and its community, an undertaking that, through an all-embracing presidium, intended to act on a political and social level even before acting on a critical one. Inserting itself in a line of studies that has only recently begun to investigate the rela- tionship between protection, research and politics in Italy in the 1970s, this contribution retraces the time of Iusco’s Lucanian regency (1971-1977) through the data provided by a batch of unpublished documents preserved today in Matera, at the Historical Archive of the Basilicata Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape Superintendency. Thus emerges an unpublished picture of the interactions between Iusco, the Ministry’s top management in Rome and local administrations, in an emblematic dialectic between centre and periphery that not only documents the endemic structural deficiencies that afflicted the sector in southern Italy – in the past as today –, but also that gives us an unknown chapter in the twentieth-century history of conservation in our country.