Autenticità, cultura materiale e vissuto emotivo. Spunti di riflessione per la conservazione

Reflecting on authenticity and its role in the protection of cultural heritage means addressing a topic that has occupied thousands of pages and documents. After having retraced the process of weakening that characterized the concept of authenticity at the end of the 20th century between The Nara Document on authenticity and the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the paper focuses on some elements that highlight the change in attitude towards the authenticity that transformed it from being the quality of things, identifiable in the traces of time, to the atmosphere of a place that emerges from a system formed by the co-presence of person-thing-lived space. The conservation project must take charge of this new element, which is part of what we call the spirit of the place and which clearly makes the integral conservation of the material and traces of the architectural object insufficient to protect the heritage.