Restoration in Calabria

The second week of class we went to Calabria. We visited several orchards, drank limoncello and ate a lot! The food was delicious! We mainly stayed in the small town of Rocca Imperiale where we cleaned and restored some 18th century furniture and an alter in a church.

 There were four pieces of furniture. One big chest for daily cloths like sheets, one medium chest which would have been used for a woman's fancy or important occasion clothes, one small chest for a baby's belongings, and a small table probably used for writing. They were all found in the basement of an 15th century castle. (I will describe the castle in more detail in another blog post.)

All the furniture was covered in dust inches thick. So we took most of the first day washing off the dust with water and brushes. After the cleaning was finished we took off some of the varnish with cotton soaked with ammonia, vinegar and water mixture. The small table had also been painted with a tacky blue color that hadn't been part of the table when it was originally made, so we scraped of the blue paint. After cleaning and removing the varnish we coated in a preserving and natural finish that made the furniture really shine.

While in Calabria, Lorenzo showed us past restoration projects. We visited many churches and sites in which he had previously worked. This was a polychrome sculpture. Much like a painting on wood, a polychrome can have many issues. They often need a lot of surface cleaning and consolidation of paint. Some polychromes can have issues of bugs eating the wood, so losses are usually filled.  There also can be a problem of combating past restorations of polychromes. They were sometimes repainted incorrectly or stripped of it's paint to reveal bare wood.

At the church in Nocara, which was a town high up in the mountains, we mainly just painted the wall and steps around the alter of St. Roch with a tan color and sponged over that to give it a type of texture. But my favorite part was applying gold leaf to metal that had been oxidized or a patina that had formed on the metal. It was a very delicate procedure. You first applied a type of natural glue and then you pressed the thin gold leaf on to it gently. You could't be too finicky with it because once it was on there it was stuck.