Abstract

In the lively debate that occupied the realm of art history in Italy between the 1970s and the early 1980s, coinciding with the institution of the Regions with ordinary statute and the almost contemporary creation of the new Ministry of Cultural Heritage, the southern regions participated only marginally. If the need for a different engagement in the government of the territories and cultural heritage was no less evident than in the other regions of Italy, the organisation and consistency of both technical and political institutions involved in the field were very different. Consequently, the responses from art historians were equally different. In the following pages, an attempt will be made to explain this diversity, highlighting the fundamental passages of the historical practice of the preservation of works of art in continental Southern Italy from the end of the Second World War to the 1980 earthquake which, for the South, continues to have a strong periodizing importance