“Litterarum plane rudis sed ingenii acumine adeo praestans”: impalcati per la manutenzione dell’architettura nella Roma settecentesca tra pratica artigianale, sperimentazione tecnica e codifica teorica

Renaissance and Baroque building machines and construction techniques have been widely explored by scientific literature. Instead, restoration scaffolding for ordinary and extraordinary maintenance works remains less investigated, also in architectural treatises. This is because in the construction sites of the modern age the construction of the scaffolding was entrusted to the experience of bricklayers and carpenters. Nicola Zabaglia (1667-1750) was an expert carpenter of the Fabbrica of St. Peter’s. His astonishing inventions and those of his successors were considered virtuous examples of operational empiricism and published in the main European treatises of carpentry until the early 20th century. Their long-lasting fortune proves that the scientific method did not make the empirical approach obsolete, but gradually combined it usefully with the theoretical precepts, sanctioning the successful qualitative transition in the relationship between theory and practice even on the construction site.