CFPR Association is a not-for-profit Association registered in Italy (Rome) in 1990, but established in 1986 as a result of the activities of a group of Italian experts (scholars, technicians and artisans) who operated according to a program directed by prof. G. Fanfoni since 1978 for the recovery of the wide area of the Mevlevi architectural Complex in Cairo (Egypt), where the association to-day has its operative center as “Centro Italo-Egiziano per il Restauro e l’Archeologia, CIERA” (Italian-Egyptian Centre for Restoration and Archaeology).
CIERA was formally defined by the Egyptian and Italian Governments with the opening to the public, on July 28th, 1988, of the restored Mevlevi Sama’khana, a cultic building with a theatre-like layout, recovered after a long educational and restoration activity, carried out in collaboration with Supreme Council of antiquities (SCA) of Ministry of Antiquities and various Egyptian Universities.
From the beginning, activities were carried out with educational and training purposes with the organization of a “work-site school”, where the practical activity of recovery interweaves with scientific and technological research and with the training (theoretical and practical) of the different professions (workers, technicians, artisans, professionals) involved in the restoration process.
The restoration interventions carried out through the work-site school constitute an identity specific to CIERA, becoming an inheritance of operative criteria, verifiable in situ and therefore valid as methodological and technical references for didactics and for future interventions. Already in 1979-80, the first restoration interventions on the sama’khana, which began with the paintings of the dome, have been carried out as a training activity for Cairo University; following that, all restoration activities have been carried out as training for the benefit of artisans and technical staff. At the same time, works carried out in the various sectors of restoration represented a constant reference for the following theoretical-practical restoration courses and for the interventions on other buildings, therefore gradually enlarging CIERA’s baggage of technical knowledge.
The purpose of the Association is “to promote studies, methodologies and techniques for the conservation of Cultural Heritage, to establish relationships with universities and institutions operating in the restoration field and favour any possible collaboration with them, to spread the results of the accomplished researches and works for an appropriate social development, to propagandise and support educational programs in the field of archaeology, restoration and conservation in general, through work-site schools, workshops and training courses, focused to the accomplishment of recovery works to be considered as a model”.
In this spirit, expressed in the statute, the association has carried out activities in Egypt in the field of education, of restoration and for the diffusion of the culture of conservation.
