---
title: "The Basilica of Saint Francis has 80,000 loose pieces, so the friars called in AI"
description: "Twenty-nine years after the Assisi earthquakes, restorers get a digital twin and an algorithm"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-04T23:59:00Z
modified: 2026-10-05T01:08:23Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/the-basilica-of-saint-francis-has-80-000-loose-pieces-so-the-429d66
language: en
tags: ["ai", "restoration", "history", "technology", "church", "culture"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# The Basilica of Saint Francis has 80,000 loose pieces, so the friars called in AI

*Twenty-nine years after the Assisi earthquakes, restorers get a digital twin and an algorithm*

By Nate Ledger · October 4, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-basilica-of-saint-francis-has-80-000-loose-pieces-so-the-429d66

## In brief

- Twin earthquakes in 1997 killed four people and left more than 80,000 basilica fragments unplaced
- Fusetti, restoring art there since the 1970s, says only artificial intelligence can finish the job
- Haltadefinizione is building a digital twin — described as the highest-resolution 3D blueprint of a building ever made — due next year
- AI will match fragments and scan for cracks and lifting paint, work Borelli says takes humans years and AI minutes
- The same technology has mapped a Roman emperor’s thermal bath, revealing forgotten chambers

Sergio Fusetti has been restoring art at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi since the 1970s, which means he has a long relationship with a recurring counterparty: earthquakes. The basilica, he says, has endured more than 20 of them. Two struck back to back in 1997, cratering part of the roof of the 13th-century church. Four people were killed by falling rubble, and Fusetti was hospitalised with injuries from the second quake. The earthquakes also left him with a specific, quantified problem: more than 80,000 fragments of the church whose proper locations he still has not determined, almost three decades later.

> This is impossible. Only artificial intelligence can help us here.

The basilica, built in the hills of Umbria, holds the tomb of Francis — whom CBS News describes as “sometimes called the original hippie,” a man who rejected his family’s wealth for poverty — and medieval masters including Cimabue, Pietro Lorenzetti, Simone Martini and Giotto came to paint scenes of his life on its walls. Restorers painstakingly reassembled much of what fell in 1997. Some frescoes remain pockmarked; some walls remain bare.

Consider, purely as a thought experiment, the worst jigsaw puzzle ever manufactured: 80,000 pieces, no picture on the box, no straight edges to cheat with, and the box itself shaken apart by geology. A human expert with twenty-nine years of tenure cannot finish it. That is roughly the problem, and it is why art historians and software engineers have now joined forces with the Franciscan friars to finish the restoration with AI.

The friars are working with Haltadefinizione, a company specialising in ultra-high-definition photography, whose chief technology officer Giovanni Borelli is building a digital twin of the basilica. His team’s gigapixel camera sees what people cannot: “You can see all the smallest details of the work of art, the strokes of the painting, of the brush. You can see everything in great detail,” he said. Cameras, drones and lasers will take hundreds of thousands of photographs, stitched into what CBS calls the highest-resolution 3D blueprint of a building ever made. It will be complete next year and available to the public.

Notice what a digital twin is, in incentive terms, for a building with a two-dozen-earthquake track record. The next quake is not a tail risk; it is a scheduled payment with an unknown date. When it arrives, restorers will have an exact reconstruction road map — a complete pre-loss condition survey, taken while everything was still standing, so that the church can be put back rather than merely mourned. Blue-sky technology project and insurance policy, same product.

Borelli’s team also plans to point AI at the pieces themselves, and at the rest of the building’s ailments. “Like cracks in the paintings, discoloration — layers of paint, lifting,” he said. “That kind of analysis done by hand and with the eyes of a physical person would require years to just do one round of the whole building. With AI, minutes.”

There is a second business here, which is access. The same technology has captured the remains of a thermal bath built by a Roman emperor — rooms with 30-foot ceilings and delicate mosaics, plus hidden chambers and passageways forgotten by history — and virtual reality lets users step inside Italy’s past. Borelli concedes VR cannot duplicate standing in front of the real thing, but “you can run, let your fantasy run wild,” as he put it. He founded one of the companies behind the technology as a software engineer new to art, focused on a question he calls philosophical: “How good can the digital representation of a physical object be? What is missing?”

Friar Guiulio Cesareo, who was a student at the church in 1997 and watched a stone archway shake, is still afraid. “If I have the impression that there is something shaking, maybe it’s just the wind, immediately I feel, you know, sort of cold coming from inside,” he said. His frame for all of this is distribution. The basilica holds what he calls a “treasure of faith and beauty,” and “technology helps us to go farther away, to reach more people than we could before. And in a more efficient way.”

Which is to say the friars have, more or less by accident, landed on the standard playbook: insure the physical asset, digitise the experience, expand the audience. The difference is that the asset is eight centuries old and the audience is whoever owns a headset.