Drawings, dissemination, archive

Abstract

In November 2015, the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca acquired, through a donation, the Marescotti Fund and in 2019 completed its inventory. The Accademia’s website, in the Archives section, contains the registry of the documents acquired and catalogued from FFM 01 to FFM 219, as well as three sections called FFM/Various, FFM/Personal and FFM/Didactics, respectively. The documents catalogued as FFM 41 and FFM 38 most likely represent the contents of the plates of the famous ‘manual’ in fascicles by Irenio Diotallevi and Franco Marescotti whose publishing project, with respect to the planned schedule, was not completed. The work contains a panel on the single-family house presented in 1945 in Catania at the ‘Prima Mostra del problema nazionale della casa’, so there is presumably a ‘graphic’ point of contact between the two files in the archive. The design of the house is well known, as it has been published in the manual as well as in other texts; this may lead one to think that, once made public, the archive document loses some of its value, as it is removed from oblivion. The role of the archive, on the other hand, is not only to preserve a given original document, which in any case remains a unique entity, a direct witness to the genesis of the project, but also to nurture its memory. The pretext of the study of Diotallevi and Marescotti’s plates, and in particular the patio house of the ‘Città del Sole’, conducted also through the results of an ‘analogue’ didactic experience, goes along this path with the intention of nourishing the archive itself with new graphic content.