
Iglesia Parroquial de San Nicolás de Bari y San Pedro Mártir
Gothic parish church whose vaulted ceilings hide nearly two thousand square meters of restored baroque frescoes.
Location
About this audio guide
The guide to this Valencia church centers on an unlikely restoration technique: lab-grown bacteria, pressed onto the ceiling on strips of paper, that spent three years quietly digesting centuries of soot, glue and old repaint without touching the paint beneath. It follows what emerged underneath, nearly two thousand square meters of frescoes designed by Antonio Palomino and finished around 1704 by his student Dionis Vidal, depicting the miracles of Saint Nicholas, and the water damage that had been eating them for generations. It also brings in Gianluigi Colalucci, who once led the last cleaning of Rome's Sistine Chapel, to see the results for himself. Look straight up at the vaults to find the colors the bacteria brought back.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Real Parroquia de los Santos Juanes Valencia
Gothic parish church with a baroque vault reborn through video-mapped light after a civil-war fire.
Real Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados
Oval-plan baroque church whose ceiling illusion of stone was painted in fresco onto wet plaster.
Iglesia de San Martín
Gothic parish church with a Flemish bronze of a knight splitting his cloak above the door.
Valencia Cathedral
Gothic cathedral chapel enshrining an ancient agate cup venerated as the true Holy Grail.
Museo del Patriarca
Renaissance seminary and church whose chapel antechamber displays a taxidermied caiman brought from colonial Peru.
Church of Santa Catalina
Baroque hexagonal bell tower on a Gothic parish church, rebuilt after a sixteenth-century fire.