Paolo Portoghesi is a professor of architectural design at the University of “La Sapienza” in Rome. He lives in Calcata, a small town in the province of Viterbo, where he works on the restoration of the towns historic center and the parish church.  With his first work, Casa Baldi, built in Olevano Romano at the end of the fifties, Portoghesi was a forerunner of the Post Modern movement of the 1960s, of which he is Italy's principal proponent. Clarifying his position, he wrote in one of his essays on the subject, ”Post Modern Architecture posits the end of prohibtionism, the opposition of funtionalism, the reconsideration of architecture as an aesthetic process, not exclusively utilitarian; the return to ornamentation, the affermation of widespread hedonism.” Director of the Architectural section of the first Biennale of Venice in 1980, he organized an exhibition at the Arsenal of Venice under the title “Presence of the Past”, which brought together the greatest post modern architects of the time: from Robert Venturi to Charles Willard Moore, Hans Hollein, Frank Gehry, Ricardo Bofill, Robert Stern, Franco Purini, Oswald Mathias Ungers and Paul Kleihues who let themselves run wild creating the special exhibit “Strada Novissima“ (Streets on the Cutting Edge), a type of manifest of the Post Modern Architecture, afterwards rebuilt in Paris and then San Francisco.