DISEGNARECON 2020 : DISEGNARECON ISSUE Vol 13, No 25 (2020) indexed in SCOPUS - Traveling from the Orient to the West and return. Cities, Architecture and Restoration

Twenty-five years from the death of Professor Paolo Cuneo (1936-1995), DisegnareCON wants to pay homage to this well-known researcher of architectural and urban history of the Islamic World, Caucasus and historic Armenia. He spent the last fruitful years (since 1987) of his activity as professor and researcher in the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning (DAU now DICEAA - Department of Civil Engineering, Construction-Architecture, Environmental) at University of L'Aquila.

The multidisciplinary approach, the capability to combine the physical knowledge of architecture (included in its urban texture and geography) with its history, documented through bibliographical, archival, iconographical and icnographical studies, represent the "red tread" of his fundamental studies focusing on multiethnic , multicultural and multireligious reality; noteworthy History of urban planning. The Islamic world , Rome-Bari 1986 and Armenian architecture from the fourth to the nineteenth century , Rome 1988.

In the wake of great scholars of the past, Paolo Cuneo investigates cities, countries and architectures through direct and indirect knowledge, in which design represents the specific and conscious instrument for analyzing, comparing, comprehending and divulging an architectural lexicon linking to a geographical area that spreads from the Mediterranean to Caucasus, Maghreb, Yemen, Libya, without omitting Italy. An insatiable and cultured curiosity, joined with a methodology culminating in identifying the character of buildings, creating categories and systematizing data on a large also geographical scale. At the beginning of the computer age, in the eighties, this approach brought Cuneo, supported by many enthusiastic collaborators and friends, to organize the digitalization of Islamic monumental architecture. More than 33.in situ during the numerous international missions.