Four of its eight walls now enchant, with the marble turned white and the mosaics shining, the other four walls will be restored within the year, and then in 2022 and 2023 it will be the turn of the restoration on the mosaics of the great internal dome of the Baptistery, on which has not been intervened for over a century. The Baptistery of Florence – Dante Alighieri’s my beautiful San Giovanni – reopens to the public on Saturday after eight months of closure and after the end of the first part of a 2 million euro project, which began in 2017 and lasted much longer than expected due to of the pandemic but also for the discovery of old structural lesions, which have been consolidated to avoid future problems.
The restoration, wanted and financed by the Opera del Duomo, involved the four walls facing north, towards via Martelli, in the part from the floor to the dome, where prophets, saints, bishops and cherubs are depicted in the fourteenth-century mosaics, together with the monument funeral of the antipope John XXIII. The tesserae have been consolidated, some small gaps have been worked on with new tesserae also in gold, the clean marbles, after careful diagnostic investigations. Now the scaffolding has been moved to the other four walls, where there is also the apse and the triumphal arch, and the intervention will be shorter thanks to the knowledge acquired in the first lot, in which, under the direction of the works Beatrice Agostini and the consultancy by Annamaria Giusti, for 30 years at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, six specialists were employed every day.
Then in 2022 and 2023, with 18 months of construction sites, it will be the turn of the 1,000 meters of mosaics in the dome, on which the Opificio delle Pietre Dure intervened between the end of the 1800s and the early years of the 1900s and then they have not been touched again – explains Vincenzo Vaccaro, councilor of the Opera del Duomo – It will take at least another 2 million euros, but we will do it, as we did this intervention despite the economic difficulties caused by the fact that our only income are tickets and the pandemic has made us close for many months and for others to work on a narrow gauge. But our aim is to enhance the monuments of the Piazza Duomo complex and we keep faith with our mission by giving Florence and the world a more beautiful Baptistery. To enter you will pay 10 euros, with a single ticket for the Baptistery and the Opera del Duomo Museum; therefore, free entry to the Baptistery for the Florentines disappears.
July 1, 2021 | 15:25
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