The Fabbrica di San Pietro — the department that oversees maintenance and repairs of the Vatican’s papal basilica — for the third year is running a free, six-month training course.
The director of the “School of Arts and Crafts,” Father Francesco Occhetta, said the course is a way for the experts who help maintain St. Peter’s Basilica to share their skills and knowledge with the next generation. He explained:
“It is important for the basilica to have this school, because it restores a tradition from the 1700s, making it central to [the basilica’s] life today. Which is why this alliance of hands, head, and heart, today, has revived something that was dying in the culture over the last 30 years.”
Cristina Squatriti is an Italian-American student following the stone and marble track of the course. Her experience at the “School of Arts and Crafts” has taught her fundamental techniques she hopes to use one day in her career. She shared:
“All of us pretty much had never touched a scalpel in our lives, so we started off with learning how to incise letters, and then we did a whole week of straight lines, which was really tough mentally, but that was how we got our hand to feel comfortable with the tools best. And then now we’re passing on to “intarsio”, which is the method where you put a block of marble inside another, like all over the floors of the basilica. It’s very slow going, because it’s a tough material to work with, but I’ve learned so much in the past three months.”
Francesco Bonello, from Malta, has a job in commercial marble cutting with his father, but thanks to the school he is learning to work with new tools:
“So originally,” Bonello shared, “I worked with my father since I was 13 years old. He’s a ‘marmista.’ We work industrially in marble, but I always wanted to learn more. The fundamental techniques of a “marmoraro”. Which differences, he works only with chisels and hammers to make beautiful works by hand, which for me, that is the passion of the work.”
Another concentration the school offers is in mosaic work. Inside Vatican City, there is the workshop where students learn and practice this delicate, patient art.
Next to the workshop, a long, narrow room holds hundreds of colors of mosaic tesserae in rows and rows of drawers.
One mosaic technique that students learn starts by fusing small glass pieces together into one mass, which is then shaped and pulled into a long “thread” of glass before being cut into the desired size and shape.
Students practice the art by copying classical or modern images, meticulously placing tile after tile.
The leadership of the school hopes the education it is providing in traditional arts and craftmanship will be of benefit not only to St. Peter’s Basilica but also to historic churches around the world.
Father Occhetta, the school’s director, said working “with the hands is one of the keys to revitalizing the world of young people in the workplace.”
Also, “There is, first of all, a spiritual dimension on which the school is based, there is a community dimension where our students, accompanied by an educator and her collaborators, grow together, and then there is a dimension properly related to learning, which is 600 hours of lessons — 200 theoretical and 400 in the laboratory — where the students meet the greatest experts of the basilica and learn concretely how to do the maintenance of the marble, of the wood, of the mosaic.
Occhetta added, “Therefore, in the age of choice, these young people can have this opportunity and then go to other basilicas around the world to be able to pass on the knowledge of the Fabbrica di San Pietro, which has lasted for 500 years.”
Adapted by Jacob Stein
