Leonardo Benevolo

1923-2017

The death of Leonardo Benevolo on 5 January 2017 was also that of the last generation of master theorists and historians of architecture in the 20th century, in particular Italian architecture: the one that starts with Bruno Zevi and Giulio Carlo Argan and ends with Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, or Benevolo himself. Born in 1923 in Orta San Giulio, in the Piamonte region, Benevolo graduated from the University of Rome in 1946 and started there an outstanding academic career which he combined with professional activity as designer and urban planner (he signed important urban projects like those of Brescia or Bologna). But, above all, Benevolo was a historian with a vast oeuvre, author of essential books like the Storia della architettura del Rinascimento in two volumes, the Storia delle Città in four, and above all, the Storia dell’architettura moderna, the ‘Benevolo’ par excellence: a colossal text with a sociopolitical and broad approach, based on the Braudelian idea of the longue durée, which enriched the perspective of the historians of modernity with his global gaze, to become an essential reference manual for a whole generation of architects in Europe.