Giuseppe Catani’s project

In 1910, to commemorate the V centenary of the merchant’s death, the painter Giuseppe Catani devised a project to recover the external pictorial apparatus and produced a series of water colour paintings in which, after studies and personal interpretations, the painted wall scenes were represented and integrated. The work did not, however, materialise and the paintings are now preserved in the Galleria di Palazzo degli Alberti.

Catani’s drawings revealed a building in evident state of decay. The various restoration projects which followed each other in the first decades of the century, however, went unheeded until after the war.
It was only in 1954, with the intervention of architect Nello Bemporad, that substantial restoration work was undertaken and by freeing the oldest part of the building from superfetations added over the centuries, restored it to its original structure.