Monitoring and Conservation plans for monumental stone buildings. The case study of the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Corte in Pistoia

Abstract

In preventive conservation of cultural heritage, regrettably, only a few concrete examples of conservation and maintenance plans for monumental assets are available. This is attributable both to the particularity of each case, which makes it difficult to draw up a standard conservation plan and to the difficulty of finding specific data to program the cyclicity of the interventions, which requires us to resort almost exclusively to continuous monitoring of monuments. On the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Corte in Pistoia, after a major restoration carried out on the occasion of the Jubilee of 2000, a series of conservation interventions on various fronts have been repeated from 2000 to today. This case was deemed particularly interesting precisely because of this peculiar palimpsest of documented interventions and has, therefore, become the subject of a doctoral research (conducted in collaboration between the University of Florence and the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape), focused on the in situ evaluation of the durability of water-repellent treatments on stone. Starting from the results already obtained with the tests of 2108, and collected in the doctoral thesis, was organized a monitoring plan of water repellent treatments commonly used on white marble, serpentine and Tuscan grey sandstone. The monitoring data should thus merge into the assessments on which the Monument Conservation Plan is founded. This essay presents the choice of the monitoring plan, the designing of test points, the performed treatments, and the planning of the monitoring; it also shows the expected results and how datasets will converge into the drafting and management of the conservation plan. As a result, the study provides useful promptings for implementing a ‘final scientific report’ and a Conservation Plan and, in general, it deepens knowledge on preventive conservation and contributes to the systematization of data for real usefulness for the maintenance of monuments.