A lighting and historically attentive restoration project of the portico which, in agreement with the superintendence, resulted in a conservative intervention that preserved the original stones and integrated the older ones.
A late eighteenth-century devotional building designed by Giuseppe del Rosso was returned to its original state with the recollocation of a statue of the Virgin Mary on the highest point of the facade’s triangular tympanum, part of a portico with four ionic sandstone columns surmounted by the central statue and two lateral statues representing angels. The statue of the Virgin had been missing since 1919, the year in which an earthquake caused it to fall to the ground, miraculously in one piece.
The intervention project for the recollocation included protecting the original manufacture by displaying it inside the church and fixing a mortar and resin copy to the roof using a removable steel plate and several stays to ensure complete stability. An initial clay model was used to form the negative cast from which the final copy of the sacred image was made, internally reinforced with metal.
Contemporaneously a lighting project was designed to accentuate both the new portico and the facade of the church by highlighting key elements.