Sinopie Museum

This guide to the Sinopie Museum in Pisa begins with a question about the rust-red sketches on the wall around you: why they only exist because a bomb destroyed one of the world's great fresco cycles. It follows the American strike on Pisa on the twenty-seventh of July, 1944, the fire that melted the Camposanto's lead roof over frescoes painted since the thirteen hundreds including Buonamico Buffalmacco's Triumph of Death, and the restorers who peeled the painted surface away sheet by sheet using a technique called strappo. You'll hear what they found underneath, and how these red-earth drawings relate to the artist's own hand versus his assistants' brushwork. Stand close to trace the lines mapped out before a single color was ever applied.