Conservation and restoration

Santa Croce houses an outstanding artistic legacy formed over almost eight centuries ranging from architecture, sculpture and painting to gold work, illuminated codices and archival assets. The Opera di Santa Croce takes care of this legacy through conservation, maintenance and restoration.

The Opera di Santa Croce is a secular institution established in the 14th century to manage, preserve and enhance the monumental complex's artistic, historical and religious assets.
The institution's economic and financial sustainability is crucial to allow it to perform its virtually never-ending task of maintaining the complex through regular monitoring, targeted intervention and major restoration. The Opera's task is not confined simply to looking after and preserving Santa Croce. Thanks to a complex set of interlocking skills and capabilities, it also ensures that the area as a whole and the individual works of art can be enjoyed in full in a context of respect for their values and their setting.

Our work consists of:

• monitoring the overall architectural structure, the works of art housed in that structure and the environmental micro-climate;
• preemptive conservation to safeguard the complex's heritage from all those elements that speed up the deterioration of works of art;
• maintenance and restoration, involving scheduling intervention on the basis of the individual artworks' needs and requirements;
• publishing the findings that emerge in the course of restoration in order to alert as broad an audience as possible to the issues involved in the conservation of works of art.