On Friday and Saturday, November 4 and 5, 2011, a comprehensive conference entitled Saving Cultural Heritage in Crisis Areas was held at the American Academy’s splendid seventeenth-century Villa Aurelia with the intent of highlighting the work of a dozen internationally renowned scholars of cultural heritage and cultural property. Their common thread? Highly effective preservation work in zones that faced extreme challenges, whether by conflict, natural disaster, or toxic bureaucracy.

The conference culminated in a lively installment of the Academy’s Conversations that Matter, moderated by AAR Director Christopher S. Celenza (1994 Fellow), with Mounir Bouchenaki (director general, ICCROM, Rome), C. Brian Rose (1992 Fellow), and Laurie Rush (2011 Fellow) as featured participants. The ninety-minute discussion appears in its entirety below.