Il restauro della Cattedrale di San Lorenzo a Genova. La ricerca di un fondamento scientifico.

The Cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa is a building that allows us to tell the emergence of a monumental consciousness, accompanied by the development of intervention methods typical of the Restoration, starting from the 1880s. At the turn of the century, the works carried out first by D'Andrade and then by the Ufficio Belle Arti of Municipality of Genoa, testify to the progressive shift from stylistic interventions to those of a philological and scientific nature. In the specific case during the demolition of a facade wall, the designer decided to rely on a chemical laboratory to obtain objective data from the analysis of mortars and bricks. The paper narrates the story, contextualizing it in its time from a cultural point of view and analysing the results obtained from those first investigations on the materials of a monument, to evaluate the impact that they may have had on the intervention.