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taken into account, differ, sometimes to a great degree, from what is actually built.This is not so in Sagunto, part of whose sketchiness, that lack of "Mediterranean sensibility" that Antonio González demanded of Giorgio Grassi in a critical session held in Valencia at the beginning of October last, is due, in my opinion, to a blind obedience to the plans on the part of those who carried out the project, to the fact that it was done from a distance and to their hurry to finish the works by 1992".After all this time has gone by I think I must insist: the most peculiar thing about the Sagunto case is that the magnificent plans and model, all done beforehand, should have been so prophetic, which makes it even more difficult to believe the judicial scandal and its unexpected verdict, just after the elections; I feel more and more convinced that the investigation was a lateral arabesque, a kind of choral accompaniment for a totally modern project, that is to say, a drawing process, done from a distance, and applied quite promptly to the poor building in Sagunto, whose Romanness was more theoretical than real.Inexperienced bureaucrats in a hurry on account of the elections, an excessively large building company and a biased newspaper did the rest.I am of the opinion that in the restoration business the project must not be like Minerva, born an adult, armed and helmeted, out of the head of her divine father, but must rather be an open, patient, repetitive search, with many pauses and stops, corrections and hesitations.The restoration project that is born out of the head of the god like Minerva and that is not modified as it goes along, can only have two explanations: it is either a masterpiece of the most exquisite prophetic methodology or it is the testimonial of repeated violations to the monument in order to make it adjust to the predictions of the project. Words, wordsOne of the problems that usually come up in architectural restoration is the variety of terms that we use in the Spanish language, since each technician who intervenes in an old building coins his own terminology, which he updates on later occasions, even at the risk of contradicting himself.In my opinion, in most cases this is a token of the immaturity that reigns in this field, in contrast with the situation in Italy, where we might say words enjoy a healthy, even longevous existence, although we must admit also that this is due to the bureaucratization of the Italian scene, dominated by well-trained, consolidated civil servants of long standing in their field.The Italian terms have naturally leaked into the jargon we use here, but it is still strange that the lesser the experience of the Spaniard, the greater his use of this terminology, so that when this experience is acquired in the field of restoration, the lexical dependence on the Italian is slighter.In this article I am not trying to establish any rules or anything like that, since I have neither the knowledge nor the authority to do so, but I would like to point out I think the words I use to define concepts are clear enough and not very misleading; I think this would be more significant when we analyse values, in which case I would consider lexical anarchy a symptom of conceptual muddling.In Spanish the discrepancies begin with the very definition of our activity, since the term "restoration", judging from the results, seems to be rather an oldfashioned, restricted word, having more to do with Fine Arts, old architects and museum ambiences; in this sense I do not think the synonyms introduce valid nuances but are, in most cases, simply a facile, shameful means of avoiding normative restrictions when they are not instances of downright snobbery or corporative deception.In this way certain professionals, ashamed of the deficiencies in their training, prefer another word, "rehabilitation" perhaps, to place their activity in a field eluding historic or artistic responsibility, which they do not yet feel prepared to assume.The concept of

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