Environmentalists have begun a campaign to save a church worked on by Michelangelo from ruin after the use of explosives on the underlying Tuscan hillside raised fears that the 1000-year-old building could collapse.
A large crack has already ripped through the marble pavement, ancient tombs, altar and baptismal font of the Romanesque Pieve della Cappella in Fabiana, near Lucca. The church nestles midway up the Altissimo hill, at the foot of which Michelangelo Buonarroti arrived in 1517 in search of the area’s distinctive marble that he intended to use for the façade of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence.