Our story begins in rubble. La Basilica di San Benedetto di Norcia was destroyed by a second set of earthquakes, after our fall trip in 2016. It held one fresco of note, the Resurrection of Lazarus (1560), painted by Michelangelo Carducci.

What’s been discovered, during the removal of the debris inside the building, is an earlier fresco, depicting an “Enthroned Madonna with Child and Angels,” that is apparently “of refined execution by a skilled, but as yet unidentified, artist.”

They are set to restore the work. Under the scientific direction of the Institute for Conservation and Restoration, the plan entails “a superficial cleaning of the fresco with [some] partial consolidation and painting of the pictorial surface.”

I am amazed to think it could be done, just as I am curious to learn more about the way that frescoes go lost in a building or the plaster crumbles away in bits, water its enemy I suppose. In any case, I here draw a line in the sands of time.