With this expression she meant the inescapable necessity of every University of Genoa, Partire per l’Italia. “Italianness” and her marked predilection for the culture of the Bel Paese, so much so that in NovemberĬonferral of an honorary degree at the Faculty of Architecture of the Obscured in Italy by a decadelong damnatio memoriae, which started in the years following his death, the figure of the Roman engineer was in fact completely rehabilitated thanks in part to the contribution of Choay, who attributed to him a fundamental role in the definition of the concept of “urban heritage.” Along this path, the contacts and exchanges between the French scholar and the Italian architectural culture gradually intensified to the point that, since the 1990s, her presence in Italy has become increasingly frequent, often traveling as a visiting professor at various universities.Īfter all, Choay –who grew up at the school of AndréĬhastel in the cult of the Italian Renaissance– has never hidden her If, in the first case, Choay has considerably favored the knowledge and the dissemination in France of Alberti’s work –even managing to edit, with Pierre Caye, in 2004, a translation and a critical edition of De re aedificatoria– in the second case, her contribution can be considered veritably decisive in the rediscovery of the figure of Giovannoni, with reflections in our country. Standing out among these, are two figures, apparently quite distant from each other, and not only chronologically: Leon Battista Alberti and Gustavo Giovannoni, to whom the scholar has dedicated important in-depth studies. Parallel to the dissemination of her work in Italy, this French scholar oriented her interests toward Italian architectural and urban culture, to the point that her own research topics benefited from a progressive influence of the work of past and present scholars on urban phenomena. This is significantly due to L’Allégorie du patrimoine, which was first published in French in 1992, and shortly thereafter translated into Italian ( Choay, 1995a). Since the beginning of the 1990s her name has rightfully joined those of the most authoritative scholars of historical and theoretical issues related to cultural heritage. She has constituted, above all, an essential reference point for Italian urban culture for at least thirty years, from the beginning of the 1970s to the end of the century. Utopie et réalités, published for the first time in France in 1965 and translated in Italy in 1973 under the title La città. Indeed, her interests move from the field of visual arts to architecture, the city and the territory, and dwelling, in her more mature years, on the theme of cultural heritage, with a particular predilection for urban heritage.Ĭhoay has been famous in Italy since the early 1970s thanks to the success of L’urbanisme. We could, in fact, simplify it by saying that the interests of Choay –a philosopher by training, with particular attention paid to the ideas of Martin Heidegger– have ranged in all areas of Heidegger’s Building, dwelling, thinking. Heritage –analyzed within “allégorie” and “questions,” to cite the titles of two of her famous volumes– is, however, only one of the many fields to which the great French scholar has dedicated her vast work. There is no doubt that Françoise Choay has decisively contributed to defining the semantics and contradictions of cultural heritage, through a substantial body of writings published between the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Urbanism, architecture and restoration from Alberti to Giovannoni
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