The Museography of Franco Minissi and the “preventive restoration”: a methodological turning point in heritage interventions from the Venice Charter to the present day

The Venice Charter promulgation, that has determined significant changes up to our present, happened in the post-war period and dictated guidelines regarding interventions on the existing and clarifying the concept of “monument”. During those years, Franco Minissi, a prominent museographer and restorer, produced quite a few museums, exhibitions and interventions for the restoration of ancient monuments. Minissi’s activity, thought and writings coincide with what is argued in the 1964 Charter, since he himself contributed to the its drafting. At the same time, Minissi considered conservation and restoration the goal of any musealization process in which restoration was to be only an operational moment. The intervention of Restoration and Museography, which, carried out according to the criteria of distinguishability and reversibility, had to be subject to constant maintenance over time in order to be able to continue to perform the function of protection and enhancement of values of the artifact or archaeological and monumental site. If Restoration seems to have found “validation” during its evolutionary path, can we argue that post-war Museography has also “evolved” in the same way? In this contribution we will analyze the specific case of the project of museographic rearrangement of the Archaeological Museum of Agrigento, whose original architectural and museographic project was designed by Franco Minissi.