Il progetto del sistema antincendio della Basilica di San Paolo fuori le mura a Roma: un caso di sicurezza antincendio del XIX secolo

Recent archive researches have revealed that, after the fire that destroyed in 1823 a large part of the papal Basilica of Saint Paul outside the walls, the Engineer and Architect Luigi Poletti was commissioned by Pope Leo XII to provide for its reconstruction.

During the accomplishment of the most important part of the work, carried out between 1833 and 1869, the Eng. Arch. Poletti asked the Pope to be helped in the realization of fire protection of building. The Pope then instructed Jesuit father Angelo Secchi, astronomer and geodesist of the Collegio Romano, to provide for the protection of the building. With the help of Giacomo Lusvergh, German and Italian naturalized optician and scientist, a complex of activities led to the creation in Rome of a fire-fighting service set up on the model adopted in the Napoleonic period in France. Of particular interest from the point of view of engineering innovation, however, is the design of a fire system that was to be built to protect the roof of the basilica. This system, in the project described by the documents of the Rome State Archives, was based on thermometers that, when exceeded at a certain temperature, activated the discharge of fire water contained in tanks under the roof of the building. Such a system can be considered one of the first cases of application of the fire safety engineering criteria to building fire protection.

The participation of the National Fire Corps at the conference was permitted by the activities foreseen in the research and development project STORM (Safeguarding Cultural Heritage through Technical and Organizational Resources Management - https://www.storm-project.eu/ ), funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 program.