Curated by the architects Francesco Collotti, Valentina Fantin and Giacomo Pirazzoli, the restoration of Fort Belvedere has been a kind of "memory’s undertaking". The technicians, in fact, decided not to make a sort of philological reconstruction of the fort after the pattern of its designer, but to intervene in order to review the different periods of the stronghold, a stratigraphy that would allow to understand the marks left by the passage of time and the different stories occurred in this area.
It would have been deeply wrong in terms of architectural restoration to bring the building back to its guessed original appearance.
As Collotti himself claims, most of the fascination of this place, at times sinister, is connected to the passage of time, to its being the centre of the world and press attention for a few months and to its subsequent sinking into oblivion. The restoration was meant to show all the structural changes implemented in course of the time, elements that make this building even more interesting: a little incomplete staircase, an exit for the infantry, the reinforcements to the coverage added during the bombardment.
Moreover, it was decided to leave the strong signs of the pillage of the stronghold, integral features of the fort, indispensable in order to understand the history of the fortress.
The team of architects has also curated the extensive part, that includes the contents of the new exhibition routes. There have been ongoing discussions as to what architectural solutions might be best suited to creating thematic routes inside the fortress.
These rooms had witnessed history, haunting memories were engraved on its thick walls. The only missing things were imagination and creativity, last contribution to an intellectual path which was inevitably already written in the site. Rereading the past, the working team has almost immediately realized that the only operation that the stronghold would have tolerated was a kind compensation for moral damages. It was necessary to give back to the fortress the iron that had been illegitimately stolen and, therefore, to work out and heal the wounded memory of this incredible artefact.
These iron sheets were very large, heavy and oxidized in order to strongly evoke the strength and hardness of the military things, the armoured domes and the machine guns. No space was given to artificial decorations, everything reflects the architectural design of the place and its purely military nature. The graphic of the display panels and of the directional marks of the routes has been produced by Architect Biorcio of the AriA’s study: metal panels with large images based on the conceptual elaboration of the historian Lucio Fabi complete routes.
