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S. Michele di Limigiano:
A Church at Risk

The church of S. Michele is nominally Gothic but feels closer to Romanesque, mostly because the arches are only very timidly ogival, and the windows are small. It would be interesting to see whether this is a purely superficial impression: i.e., whether the basic structure handles stresses like a Gothic church, which could have allowed the architect to introduce more light. At any rate, austere in its lines and subdued in its decoration, it's a beautiful church.

Unfortunately, the church is having water problems. Let's look first at this angel, near the front door: almost certainly the church's patron, St. Michael himself, since he must be holding a spear, the sharper end of which must once have been embedded in the enemy dragon:

Now the abbey church of S. Michele was completely overhauled in 1947; and although I don't know for a truth that all the paintings were fully cleaned at the time, such is common practice, and I suspect they must have been — for one thing, restorations are usually marked by the style of their own period, despite every attempt to prevent it, and the face you see has a certain mid‑20c look about it — so that this recent-looking water damage must in fact postdate the restoration.

Based on what I do know about other churches in the area, it seems most likely that the main tremors of the 1997 earthquake, the epicenter of which was at Colfiorito, less than 25 km from Limigiano, dislodged something in the roof, or caused the walls to bow out slightly, resulting in infiltrations that damage the walls every time it rains: that, at any rate, is the pattern elsewhere in Umbria.

In the case of our angel above, the water has just been running down the vertical wall; but the situation gets much worse on some of the ceilings of the church, where instead of fast-moving rivulets, we've had water slowly pooling before it drops to the floor:

This old church, though, is still very much alive, as we can see from the following; but water could be fatal here as well, if in a more modern way:

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