The relationship between Mario Ridolfi and Umbria has always been marked by a particular depth, so much so that the Roman architect decided to spend the last phase of his life there. Ever since the competition for the fountain in Tacitus Square in 1931, his professional career has intersected on numerous occasions with the city of Terni, for which he was called in 1945, after the violent Anglo-American bombing in July 1943, to draw up the Reconstruction Plan and later, in 1960, the General Regulatory Plan. Ridolfi’s contribution to the definition of the city’s urban fabric was not limited, however, to the drafting of urban planning instruments aimed at recovering the identity lost as a result of the extensive damage suffered during World War II; in fact, he designed numerous buildings over the years, many of them residential, which, starting from the local building tradition and revisiting it through his particular material sensibility, contributed to outlining a new image of the city. The contribution presents the study of the Leonardo da Vinci school, built precisely in the area affected by the Reconstruction Plan and intended to meet the need to provide the city of Terni with a school building designed solely to accommodate middle school students. The troubled design process of the work, which began in 1951, developed for almost ten years during which three different projects and numerous variants were drawn up until, in 1961, the building was completed in which, as Sergio Poretti points out, «the conjugation of frame, masonry and window becomes a fundamental compositional motif from which springs that ineffable building realism for which the image magically reflects the atmospheres the tones the moods of the place».
