Camillo Boito and his early theorization of architectural restoration
In the treatises on the history of restoration starting from the statements of Gustavo Giovannoni who
declared himself one of his students, Camillo Boito is recognized as the “inspirer of modern restoration
theory”. For a long time, Boito considered himself the “creator of the intermediate concept between the
positions of Viollet- le-Duc and Ruskin” and even the “promoter of the first Italian Charter of Restoration”
in 1883, in the form of a vote of seven maxims during the work of the IV Congress of Italian engineers and
architects, held in Rome in 1883. The recent discovery of one of his essays published in the journal “Nuova
Antologia di Scienze Lettere ed Arti” of 1872, which had escaped historiography, definitively clarifies the
real role Boito had in the theorization of restoration. The themes dealt with in this essay reveal a restorative
spirit and allow, as Giovanni Carbonara argued in 1997, to consider Boito «more than an innovator ... a
wise divulger and reorganizer of concepts that we have occasionally seen emerge in restoration since the
eighteenth century anticipations».
