The restoration work on the Portici del Comune will start in September: everything is ready, the work has already been assigned, but the construction site which should have started at the beginning of June will be postponed until after the summer as Piazza del Comune will be a place for events and concerts.
The deputy mayor confirms this Andrew Virgil: “We preferred not to create inconveniences with a construction site under the porticoes during the summer, when the square is full of tourists and events“.
After more than three years of waiting, therefore between structural analyzes and cost increases, the restoration of the porticoes of the Palazzo Comunale is finally certain and will be fully operational from September.
Harnessed for years now in heavy metal cages to support their weight, they have unfortunately left an open wound in a building of great historical value, overlooking the main square of the city, right under the tallest bell tower in Europe, our Torrazzo.
Now everything is confirmed: the construction site for the renovation and reinforcement of the arches is now on the horizon. “The interventions will begin after the summer and will continue for approximately four months. It will therefore not be a very short-term intervention given the delicacy of the works and the care that will have to be carried out, given that it is a historic building and subject to the constraints of the Superintendency. This work will be financed with direct resources from the Municipality“.
Last year the start of the works was postponed to a later date due to the difficulty in finding the necessary funds for the intervention (the costs had risen from 180,000 to 300,000 euros due to the dramatic increase in the prices of raw materials , in particular steel), now the start of work is finally official.
The choice of the intervention to be implemented was dictated by the conditions of the structures and the architectural constraints to which the building is subject: to reinforce the arches, a parallel reinforcement system will be positioned, a sort of thin and discreet metal exoskeleton so as not to compromise the aesthetics of the columns, but capable of absorbing and discharging part of the weight of the structure to the ground and restoring stability to the arches.
And so the people of Cremona and tourists will finally be able to have this portico back in all its beauty, without unsightly metal cages which, although essential to guarantee its stability, had now undermined the austere beauty of the ancient red brick structure.
The architectural complex of the Town Hall dates back to the 13th century, founded in 1206 and then expanded in 1245; starting from the end of the 1400s, a series of renovation interventions began which followed one another over the centuries, reaching the maximum reform of the architectural structure with the interventions of the 1830s, when the entire level of the portico was lowered and decided to open three new arches, according to the project entrusted to the architect Luigi Voghera in 1835.
Today the porticoes and the arches that characterize them suffer the consequences of these important alterations and, naturally, are affected by the weight of age, highlighting the detachment of the ring nuts of the arches from the central part, various signs of instability with the consequent crushing and fracture of the capitals in granite, as a result of which it was necessary to secure the porticoes with metal support cages which remained there for three years, awaiting the start of the works.
