Word: poggetto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...winding staircase, Sabino Giovannoni scraped away at the accumulated layers of soot, grime and whitewash. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the face of a woman began to emerge, a primeval woman who looked remarkably like the Eve in the Sistine Chapel. After several hours, Giovannoni telephoned Medici Chapels Director Paolo dal Poggetto. "Come over quickly," he said. "We've got something important here...
Tourist Swarms. Like many such discoveries, the Michelangelo works were found partly by accident. For years, Dal Poggetto and his colleagues have been worrying about the crowds of tourists-sometimes 4,000 a day-who come swarming into the chapel to see the seven brooding marble statues that Michelangelo carved to commemorate the Dukes Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici. There is only one door for the tourists to enter and leave the chapel by way of the crypt...
...Poggetto began wondering whether he could devise some alternative entry through one of the chapel's other doors. There are eight in all, two on each wall, but four of them are blank. A sealed door leads to the adjacent Church of San Lorenzo, and the last two open into small unused rooms on either side of the altar (Michelangelo called them lavamani, or washrooms). One of these lavamani had traces of various 16th century sketches under its old whitewash. The other had a trap door in its floor leading to a long, narrow storeroom. Perhaps, Dal Poggetto thought...
Cutthroat Foiled. But what were the drawings doing in that narrow chamber? Dal Poggetto has a theory. In 1527 the Medici, who had virtually become kings, were expelled from Florence by a wave of republican sentiment. When the Medici resumed their grip on the city in 1530, a purge of republicans followed, and a cutthroat named Alessandro Corsini was hired to murder Michelangelo-who had vocally sided with the republican cause. According to an old tradition, the great sculptor, who was then at work on the Medici tombs, hid in the bell tower of a church on the other side...
Only one problem now remains for Dal Poggetto. Since the general public cannot be let into the storeroom containing the drawings (the space is too confined, the risk of damage too large), he will have to find yet another exit-corridor from the Medici tombs. And for the moment, there seems to be none...
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