15 March 2022

The small parish church of Borgo San Felice, a hamlet perched on the top of a hill among Chianti hills, in the municipality of Castelnuovo Berardenga, has an ancient history, and a long period of abandonment in recent history.

The decorations and plasters of the Pieve were, before the intervention, in a fairly good state of conservation.
The main conservation problem was caused by the presence of lifting and falling of the support plaster in the
upper part of the walls, due to previous infiltrations from the roof. The same cause had led to the deterioration of limited portions of the decorations on the vault, where part of the decoration was missing.

The sacristy was similarly affected by gaps in the pictorial decorations of the vault, painted with a very intense blue colour, and also had gaps on the side walls, unlike the completely decorated parish church here.
In the latter case, the cause of the deterioration was not due to infiltrations from the roof but to the presence of rising damp on the side walls, with the consequent formation of salts and detachment of parts of the plaster.

Once the mobile scaffolding was mounted inside the Pieve, a series of checks were carried out, first of all the beating of the plaster areas that showed detachments from the underlying masonry. Got the map of the areas subject to detachment, the degraded parts of the plaster on the walls were scraped off, an operation limited to the upper part of bay IV, to small portions of bay and to the plaster of part of the masonry in the sacristy.

The portions of plaster next to the removed parts, after carrying out a lime mortar-based protective edge, were consolidated and the same was done for the small areas of detachment between plaster and masonry identified during the first mapping phase.

A low specific weight natural hydraulic lime-based mortar was used for the consolidation, injected with syringes into holes drilled by hand and previously washed.

The parts of plaster removed, after careful washing of the underlying masonry, carried out with demineralised water, were compensated with plaster based on natural hydraulic lime in two layers, a first, with coarser inert, applied directly to the masonry and a second with inert end.

Cracks, fractures and small gaps were closed with very fine inert lime mortar and glazes were spread with lime colours. The raised flakes of color were generally sealed on the vaults with less than 3% acrylic resin, applied with brushes and syringes only in the areas affected by deterioration. The decors were cleaned with a surfactant, followed by a sponge rinse.

Also in this case gaps and fractures were compensated with a mortar based on natural hydraulic lime and fine inert, then reconstructed pictorially. Since the main shortcomings, also in this case located on the fourth bay, involved areas in which the design was completely missing, the decorations present were dusted off and the carryover was carried out with charcoal dust, an operation made difficult by the fact that the sometimes they are not of equal size and it was necessary to adapt the design to the new surface. The design was reconstructed with the use of natural pigments dispersed in lime, maintaining a slight undertone in the entirely reconstructed areas to allow the intervention carried out to be read and to recognize the difference from the original design.

In the sacristy, a consolidation intervention was also carried out on the vaults and the new plastering of the degraded part of the masonry,in which the degraded plaster had previously been removed. At the end the pictorial decoration was resumed with the use of natural pigments in lime.

Tuscany - REA - Restauro e Arte
Tuscany - REA - Restauro e Arte
Tuscany - REA - Restauro e Arte
Tuscany - REA - Restauro e Arte
Tuscany - REA - Restauro e Arte
Tuscany - REA - Restauro e Arte
Tuscany - REA - Restauro e Arte
Tuscany - REA - Restauro e Arte
Tuscany - REA - Restauro e Arte