by Gabriele Masiero
The Church of Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri, in Pisa, is a treasure chest which, in recent years, has too often been closed to the public due to the ailments of the weather. It houses valuable testimonies of Medici Pisa of absolute value. It is one of the most important monuments in the city which for years, at more or less regular intervals, has remained off limits to anyone.
Now, as part of the project to enhance Piazza dei Cavalieri, the result of an agreement between Normale and the Pisa Foundation, the idea of the Pisan superintendent, Valerio Tesi, is to replicate what happened with the excavation of the Roman ships in San Rossore , one of the main archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, creating a sort of construction site-museum open to the public in the church. “Two small restoration interventions are already underway – explains Tesi – to evaluate the state of conservation of the wooden coffered paneling of the church, which unfortunately is in worse condition than we imagined, but a monument of this kind cannot remain closed and therefore we will allow guided tours for small groups starting from the European Cultural Heritage Days scheduled for September and then also to appreciate the ongoing restoration work”.
Meanwhile, the historical valorization project wanted by Normale and Fondazione Pisa is extended to all the buildings and the square itself. And it aims to tell scholars and tourists the story of a place that has been the central place of the city’s civil, political, religious and cultural life since 1288. A dedicated website brings together science and dissemination, revealing the secrets of the palaces overlooking Piazza dei Cavalieri, redesigned by Giorgio Vasari by order of Cosimo I: Palazzo della Carovana, the church of Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri, Palazzo della Canonica, Palazzo dei Twelve, in addition to the Palazzo dell’Orologio and the church of San Rocco.
At the round table “The square: political, artistic and narrative space” with Lucia Simonato (Scuola Normale, scientific director of the project to enhance the square), Giuseppe Marcocci (historian of the University of Oxford) and Dominique Poulot (historian of the Sorbonne), The director of Qn La Nazione il Resto del Carlino Il Giorno, Agnese Pini, also participated: “The square – she said – in contemporary times embodies the identity of the people, nation and homeland of a country, previously it was the physical place of a community today is often supplanted by virtual ‘squares’ which however do not represent us but a set of individual selves”. “We have tried to enhance the experiential aspect of Piazza dei Cavalieri – adds Lucia Simonato – by studying how life has taken place within it over the centuries. This new approach has certainly enriched our scientific research with new questions, but it also allowed us to create a bridge between today’s perception (by the city community and tourists) and the historical perception of the square, making its knowledge more fascinating and immersive”.
“For centuries, squares have told – concludes Marcocci – the relationship between power and the population. And they do so through an iconography that helps us read, through the glasses of history, the transformations and stratifications of society, from the past to the present day I think of the Masaniello revolt in Naples depicted by a painter from Campania, but also of the multi-ethnic complexity of a square in Lisbon depicted by a Portuguese author”.
