Fontana spent from 1946 to 1958 working from a manifesto toward one gesture: a blade drawn once through a painted canvas. His Milan neon arabesque and auction record show how far the idea travelled.
The 1980s Sistine Chapel cleaning that art historians still dispute
Gianluigi Colalucci’s fourteen-year restoration stripped centuries of soot from Michelangelo’s ceiling, funded by a Japanese broadcaster’s exclusive photo rights, and critics still argue it removed the artist’s own finishing touches.
The mathematician who painted night for the first time
Piero della Francesca spent fourteen years on the Legend of the True Cross in Arezzo, applying the geometry of his own perspective treatise. Forgotten for centuries, the cycle was restored between 1985 and 2000.
Letizia Battaglia and Palermo’s archive of blood
Starting in journalism at forty, Battaglia (1935-2022) photographed Mafia murders for L’Ora, supplied evidence used against Giulio Andreotti, and opened Palermo’s International Centre of Photography in 2017.
Cremona still builds violins the way Stradivari’s teacher did
From Andrea Amati’s sixteenth-century workshop to Antonio Stradivari’s 650 surviving instruments, Cremona’s violin trade won UNESCO recognition in 2012 and, in 2019, closed its streets to record priceless instruments for a digital archive.
Ivrea’s typewriter town and the designers who reinvented it
Adriano Olivetti built Ivrea around his typewriter factory, hiring Nizzoli and Sottsass to design objects as considered as its buildings; the town became a UNESCO site in 2018, three decades after Sottsass founded Memphis in Milan.
The bottles Giorgio Morandi refused to let anyone dust
For three decades Morandi painted the same small group of jars and boxes in a Bologna flat, teaching etching by day. His prize at the 1948 Venice Biennale brought the reclusive painter belated recognition.
Inside Pompeii’s Regio IX, where a third of the city is still buried
A flatbread fresco mistaken for pizza, a black-walled hall painted with the Trojan War and a bakery-prison with barred windows: what a new excavation front at Pompeii has uncovered since 2023.
The twenty-one-year job that gave back an honest ruin
Leonardo’s experimental technique made The Last Supper start decaying almost at once. A 1978–1999 restoration stripped away centuries of repainting, dividing critics between an authentic wreck and a lost masterpiece.