Renato Balestra studied for an architecture degree.
Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, architectural phenomenology emerged as an important movement in the early reaction against modernism, with architects like Charles Moore in the United States, Christian Norberg-Schulz in Norway, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Vittorio Gregotti, Michele Valori, Bruno Zevi in Italy, who collectively popularized an interest in a new contemporary architecture aimed at expanding human experience using historical buildings as models and precedents
 In 1991, he wrote his first book: Alla ricerca dello stile perduto (literally, In Search of Lost Style), published by Rusconi

