You could call it an immensely complex jigsaw puzzle. It is quite simple, really. Just take a heap of rubble and poke around in it until you find bits of a 13thcentury fresco and then put them all together.
Never mind that there are literally tons of rubbish to sift through, and never mind that the small team of dedicated art restorers have no sophisticated, computerised technology with which to accomplish the task. The sharpness of the Italian (female) eye and the steadiness of the Italian (female) hand will do the trick.
Paola Passalacqua, head of the small all-woman team of art restorers currently working at the Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi, spends her life not so much looking for a needle in a haystack as looking for a giveaway shine of blue or pink in a grey heap of dust and rubble. Hers is no small task. When two earthquake tremors hit Assisi on September 26th, they did fatal and twofold damage. Not only did the earthquakes kill 11 people, but they also did untold structural damage to many of the historical buildings which make the regions of Umbria and the Marche in central Italy the deposit of perhaps the greatest artistic patrimony in the world.
The most obvious and sensational damage was done to the Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi, the town of St Francis. Part of the ceiling in the Upper Basilica collapsed with the consequent loss of frescoes by the 13th century maestro Cimabue, also the teacher of Giotto. Ms Passalacqua and her team are now attempting to put approximately 90 square metres of frescoes back together again, literally bit by bit.
Arriving in Assisi on a recent, brilliantly sunny November morning, it seems as magical as ever. There is that familiar sense of awe a no frenetic clatter of tourists. Car parks, bars, restaurants and hotels are empty, if not closed. Roads are closed off, scaffolding props up several buildings and, most obviously of all, the Basilica itself appears to have been turned into a mini-building site.
Two factors have made Assisi an almost deserted town, populated only by TV crews and an Irish Times reporter. Firstly, the Basilica remains closed to the public in the wake of the September earthquakes and secondly, continuing mini-tremors tend to frighten off wouldbe visitors.
The lawn in front of the Upper Basilica has been temporarily turned into Tent City, providing an ad hoc, rather chilly laboratory for Ms Passalacqua and her team. Beyond the tents, a huge rubbish chute of interconnected plastic buckets rises all the way to the very roof of the church.
When you climb up there, not only are you afforded a splendid panorama of the Umbrian countryside, but you get to enter into what is effectively the Basilica's attic, the area between the roof and the ceiling. Along an improvised gangway, workmen emerge out of the gloom and dust, bending down and pushing wheelbarrows of rubble destined for the chute.
The walkway follows the length of the Basilica, from the main entrance up towards the altar. As you struggle along it, suddenly the ceiling two to three feet below you is no longer. Suddenly, there is a huge hole and you are looking down onto the floor of the Basilica itself.
Below you can see the rubbish and debris that was once early Renaissance fresco. Looking down from the roof, the floor seems far away. It is not difficult to understand why four people - two Franciscan friars and two local authority technicians - met their deaths on September 26th, crushed under the weight of the ceiling that gave way when the second tremor struck. The four men in question had gone into the Basilica at around 11 that Friday morning to inspect the damage of the first tremor which had come eight hours earlier, at around 3 a.m.
Looking down into the Basilica, it is as if the second tremor had occurred only yesterday. Much rubble has clearly not been touched since the collapse. Prof Paolo Rocchi, head of the team of architects and engineers who have had to ensure the Basilica's stability in the immediate post-earthquake period, points out that before allowing workers and equipment into the heart of the Basilica, it was first necessary to stabilise the roof and upper walls for fear of further collapse. Prof Rocchi points to the "ribs" which criss-cross over the Basilica, forming the basic supporting structure: "Look there, that's a big crack . . . It gives us a certain cause for concern," he says.
Indeed, it gives the unexpert visitor a certain cause for concern, too. Repair work is now focussed on such cracks, with a variety of resins, netting and pastes being used to form a sort of invisible giant elastoplast that is discreetly placed over the cracks.
An important aspect of the repairs also involves the removal of the accumulated rubbish of the last seven centuries - bricks, stones and mortar that have gathered over the ceiling as occasional running repairs were carried out. This rubbish adds unnecessary weight to the ceiling and it may even have caused the September 26th collapse.
Another theory about the September disaster is that it was provoked by ill-advised roof strengthening of the early 1950s carried out by a way of a reinforced concrete "ribbing" all around the top of the Basilica. The theory is that such concrete is much less flexible than the wooden rafters and beams of the roof and therefore provoked the collapse.
Prof Rocchi does not dismiss the theory but points out that it is much too early to know exactly why or how the Basilica was so seriously damaged. In the meantime, however, he says that the team of fresco restorers can soon get started on the remains of the rubble in the Basilica.
Ms Passalacqua's team has already sifted its way through one consignment of rubble, closer to the front door. Their method with the next consignment will be the same as with the first. Much patience and very sharp eyes go through the rubble, dividing, cataloguing and classifying everything by size and colour, from whole hunks of pillar to tiny fresco fragments smaller than a finger nail. Walk around the restoration "lab" and you find shelves and shelves of neatly catalogued fresco fragments laid out in white plastic, shallow containers. To anyone else, they might seem like bits of coloured stone to put on your mantelpiece, but to Paola Passalacqua and her small team of helpers, these fragments are identifiable - "San Rufino's Rib", "San Gerolamo's Beard", "From the San Gerolamo" etc, etc is written on the side of the boxes.
The question now is, what next? Do Ms Passalacqua and her team attempt to put the frescoes back in place? Or will they be consigned to a museum? Will the restorers find enough of the fallen frescoes to at least partially reconstruct a whole area of ceiling?
Even more critical is the problem of putting together fragments of radically different dimensions, depending on how much of the ceiling plaster remained attached to the fragment of fallen fresco. Paola Passalacqua thought a lot about this and decided that what she needed was a purpose-designed computer software programme which would take on board her unique requirements. She even wrote to Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates, asking for help and advice. So far, Mr Gates has failed to seize what would surely be the computering PR coup of the end of century. Any offers out there?
With much of the Cimabue frescoes still trapped in a ugly heap of rubble, clearly the restoration process will be a long one. Prof Rocchi believes that the Upper Basilica will be ready again for the Millennium celebrations in two years time and at a cost of £20 million pounds. Paola Passalacqua cannot be so specific about the frescoes, observing: "We need to be patient, very patient. Perhaps this is why it is nearly always women who do this type of work."