Marble monuments are frail things; smog and pollution are their true enemy, but thank heaven Milan’s Cathedral, one of the pearls of the city, has just been restored to its original beauty.
The 20 million restoration work took five years, but now the city of Milan can at last welcome back its most famous monument.
Cardinal Tettamanzi will publicly bless the new façade on 6th January and an important concert will take place at the annexed chapel on 15th January.
A lot of hard work has gone into it.
As you can imagine, architects and workers faced a daunting array of challenges.
They worked for a total of 250,000 hours, but to this you must also add 200,000 more hours that they spent extracting marble from the quarries of Candoglia (300 cubic metres of precious marble).
This Candoglia marble was used for the 192 statues and 47 bas-reliefs that decorate the 3,500 square metre facade; the massive scaffolding around the Duomo was 7000 square metres in size.
A real “monster”! So if you want to see Milan’s Cathedral in its new sparkling dress, run to Italy and take your place in the queue.