How Was L'Aquila Built

L'Aquila is built of local limestone in two colours, and it is currently the largest restoration site in Europe.

Collemaggio

The facade of Santa Maria di Collemaggio, begun in 1288, is a flat screen of pink and white stone laid in a geometric chequer, with three rose windows and three portals. There is nothing else quite like it in Italy. The nave collapsed in 2009; the restoration, completed in 2017, deliberately left the interior plain rather than recreating lost baroque decoration.

The grid

Because the city was founded rather than grown, its plan is unusually regular for a medieval Italian town: a grid of quarters, each historically associated with one of the contributing castles, each with its own church.

The fountain

The Fontana delle 99 Cannelle of 1272 is a walled trapezoidal basin faced in pink and white stone, with ninety-nine spouts, many of them carved as heads, no two alike. The source of its water has never been fully established.

The Forte Spagnolo

A square sixteenth-century fortress with angled bastions, built by the Spanish after a revolt, paid for by a tax on the city and pointed at it rather than outward.

San Bernardino

The basilica's facade, designed by Cola dell'Amatrice in the 1520s, is a three-tier arrangement of paired columns in the classical orders stacked one above another — a full-blown Renaissance composition in a mountain city. It held in 2009 while the dome and interior behind it did not, which is a fair summary of how the earthquake treated the place.

Since 2009

Steel bracing, scaffolding, propped facades and cranes are part of the streetscape and will be for years. Some of the restoration is exemplary; some sites have barely moved. Both are visible on the same walk.