La riscoperta dell'antico e del dorico. Sulle tracce degli architetti-viaggiatori a Paestum tra Sette e Ottocento

After years of neglect and oblivion, from the mid-Eighteenth century, Paestum became one of the obligatory landmarks on the Grand Tour. Travelers of different backgrounds and origins they forward in the Southern Italy to visit the temples, symbolic testimony of Greek civilization and of the archaic Doric style. The majesty of the ruins of Paestum, that resurface from the thickly wooded and impassable marshes of the Sele, stimulates a true revival of the ancient myth. The consolidated idea on the aesthetic laws of classical architecture must now be confronted with the reality of the strict colonnades of Paestum. The columns without basis, the proportions, the primordial forms, bring into crisis the historical patterns borrowed from the Roman tradition to which reference was made until then and it triggers an alight cultural debate between the Ancients and Moderns. The discovery and the desire of archeology attract many learned men that documenting their visit to Paestum with their travel journals but also through depictions. Within the great philosophical and artistic ferment of the eighteenth century and of a large part of the nineteenth century, in fact, it triggers a vigorous fad of the representation that includes a very diverse production: by the iconographic compendiums (Joli, Morghen, Piranesi) to sketches drawn with the most rapid lines (Soane); by the representations of a general nature, often based upon reference models – such as the famous bird’s-eye view of the pestan plain, resumed, among others, by Giraud and Soane – to depiction from the inside of the temple of Neptune with the endearing features of the double order - inaugurated by Clérisseau and Piranesi, then shooting from von Klenze in Duban, up to Viollet-le-Duc. Doesn’t lack the representations generated by a more scientific approach and understood as tools for dissemination and knowledge. Just think of the refunds realistic and detailed of Delagardette, author of dimensional drawings, result of an unprecedented methodological rigor; or the reconstructive hypotheses resulting from the critical-interpretative analysis proposed by the French Labrouste and Thomas. The abundance of drawings come down to us demonstrates the attention bestowed to the pestan ruins, while the variety of the techniques of representation testifies to the different cultural training of their creators, in addition to the different objectives of the visits. The proposed study, while not neglecting the protagonists of this rediscovery already the subject of many studies, want to turn the spotlight on lesser-known characters, focusing on architects-travelers who visited the pestan ruins between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The analysis of an odeporic production more unknown, but no less significant, is also the starting point for a reflection on the personality of the individual authors, on the specificity of the approach and on the possible effects on their subsequent project activities.