Few inhabitants of Massa (a Tuscan town) know that on the square now called "degli Aranci"
(of oranges) there was a big baroque church. We can bring it back to life...once more
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The
idea
of representing
a non-existing building may appear as an oddness. Indeed, the contemporary
Piazza Aranci, in Massa doesn't allow to guess the shape of the ancient
Collegiate Church, collapsed in 1672, re-builded in 1700 and demolished
by sovereign order in 1807
There are few documents or paintings views representing the church (named after St.Peter). At a frist sight the recostruction may appear a hazard, but on a closer look all the recostruction simply results from the collection of local storiography. The recostruction, started, so, by the study of the furniture and sacred vessels that were carried out from the church. Infact the Napoleon's sister Elisa Baciocchi, who rules Massa at that time and ordered the demolition, needed too many hodmen to reach her intention, but she couldn't find them inside the town. So she had to search them outside Massa and rewarded them with the disassembled part of the church. Therefore the furniture of St. Peter can be seen into the churchs of Gragnana,Stazzema, Pontremoli and other nearby villages. The great part of the work was made by analysis of ancient documents (from the year 1000 A.D.) that convey us many informations and suggest the conformation of the building. As a result of their comparison and our deductions we can clearly imagine the church. After the analysis, the collected data were put into a computer. Once modelling and rendering were made, Massa could be seen as it would appear to pedestrians living in 1790. |
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