1st International Conference on Restoration. Auditorium of the Regional Council of Tuscany, Florence. November 24th, 1995. Marco Dezzi Bardeschi speaks of the city as an « open work » with its stratifications and material heritage, a whole that is a monument-document to be preserved. He tells about of the relationship with the project of the new which adds history without taking it away. Then he explains about the anti-historicity of the restorations and reconstructions. Existing architecture is a complex collective resource to be preserved in its heterogeneity, without diminishing but adding, with a culture of project and compatible reuse. He proposes the theme of the survival of the Modern, which does not hide the fragility of the materials and does not show itself as perennial as in its premises. But it has to be saved with the signs of time. Without restoring and without losing the material culture of the building. As instead happened with the nonchalant recovery in the restoration of the Weißenhof district in Stuttgart, an historic complex of buildings from the Modern Movement. Among the problems he mentions the bureaucratic one of law 1089, with the threshold of 50 years to be able to consider modern or contemporary architecture as a monument to be protected and the condition that the author is not living Enzo D’Angelo replies with historian Edward Carr: «The line of demarcation between prehistoric and historical times is crossed when people cease to live only in the present, and become consciously interested both in their past and in their future». He says: « The timeline is unreasonable ». He quotes Marc Bloch: « There is no difference between past and present ». Then he says: « Where were the Renaissance or the Baroque? Then they weren’t there! Gothic was then only a derogatory expression of Leon Battista Alberti! Modern and contemporary follow each other and, when they associate, they tend to disappear in the perception of most ones, confused or distracted. They easily leave room for the more distant, more identifiable past, for the unrealistic and pathetic shared memory. The building of Modern soon proved to be frail, it is often built with plastered bricks that must show a newness constructive system and the question arises of how and what to conserve. The design suggestions of concrete and its perishability are a current theme both for conservation and for the project ». Both of them, Marco Dezzi Bardeschi and Enzo D’Angelo, talk about the initial censorship in the postwar decades about the period of the twenty years of fascism and about the Modern, which slowly eased. They talk about new materials, autarkic materials, design, conservation and planning. Dezzi Bardeschi says: « We’ll have to talk more about it ». From this day begins a series of appointments on conservation of architecture that lasted for about a decade. (Text by Riccardo Pantò)