The restoration of a notable building: Palazzo Testa-Pelosi in Frigento

Within PON_MeTRiCs “Methodologies and technologies for the management and recovery of historical centres and prestige buildings” research project, the DiARC multidisciplinary research group coordinated by author, in order to verify the achieved methodological acquisitions, converged, in the research’s ending phase of Experimental Development – after the examination of some exemplarizing case studies – on the area in the North-West urban fabric of the historical Centre of Frigento. These project insights involved many disciplinary skills – the relief, the technological and environmental design, the restoration, the architectural and urban design – beginning with some basic preliminary contributions provided by the disciplines of history of architecture and the city. All these contributions and experiments had a significant moment of synthesis and integration in the project proposals for Palazzo Testa-Pelosi. This noble building of ancient construction, now in a ruinous state, was paradigmatic of a coherent intervention with the research themes and objectives in order to recover valuable artefacts, recognizing the historical and documental value of monumentum or of primary element (Rossi, 1966) to this vestige in relation with the urban fabric (Caniggia-Maffei, 1984). The case of Palazzo Testa-Pelosi, in this framework, is paradigmatic precisely because it raises a number of issues and theoretical and methodological hubs within research and design in the relationship between old and new, in the field of urban restoration and posttrauma building re-construction. A relationship that is particularly significant when the ancient, its vestiges being ruined largely lost their formal unity while retaining a significant testimonial value both for the urban location and for the spatial qualities, for the morphologicaltypological structure of which they represent a stable stage and relevant re-formulation.