Giovanni Tortelli and Roberto Frassoni started out in the BBPR office working alongside Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso before then moving to that of Franca Helg – Albini Helg Piva. There they acquired solid knowledge and culture, and a profession as well as how to develop a design approach that is attentive to local history and the surrounding context, together with the compositional language required for its construction.

Over the last 30 years, their design work has constantly featured a compositional language based on rigour and “clean lines” that lend dignity and practicality to a process that leaves its mark on the present. They are able to read and assess pre-existing traces (including immaterial ones), shoulder the responsibility of selecting those beneficial to us and enhancing and favouring only those that will strike a chord or remain in our memories. The sequences recomposing and reassembling objects are never repetitive, standard or “merely” chronological but always surprising and unpredictable because they immerse visitors in a narration that they themselves reorder as they pass through the redesigned spaces.

All this also has the virtue of fuelling a new dialogue among diverse and complementary disciplines: architecture, archaeology, restoration, museography and the history of art. The works illustrated in this book record truly interdisciplinary “cultural projects” that constantly pay homage to our history and collective memory.