David ‘threatened’ by rail tunnel

An architect pronounced as an expert in underground construction, Fernando de Simone of Parma, has called for a new underground home to be constructed for Michelangelo’s statue of David, to avoid claimed likely damaged from new rail tunnel construction work in Florence due to start this summer.

The fact that the statue is in a perilous state has been known for a long time. The picture here shows a scanning image produced in 2008 to illustrate areas of high likely stress in the statue, confirming weak spots, especially in the ‘tree trunk’ supporting the right leg of David. The statue already has many tiny cracks in its marble structure allegedly due to both the low quality of the original marble used by Michelangelo and the footsteps of the many visitors. The image is part of work on Scan and Solve computer software developed by Vadim Shapiro of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Igor Tsukanov of Florida International University’s Spatial Automation Laboratory for the US National Science Foundation.

The tunnelling work in question consists of a tunnel approximately 6.4km long, and a new underground station in Florence at Firenze Santa Maria Novella allowing the existing station to become a through link instead of a head-stop, with high-speed routes to Rome and Milan. The new station and tunnel will go under the existing station and will house a new link between the new Bologna-Florence high-speed line and the existing Florence-Rome Direttissima line. The planned tunnel alignment was about 600m from the statue of David at its home in the Accademia Gallery.

It has not been reported how much damage moving the statue might cause. One art critic, Vittorio Sgarbi, has called for the tunnel excavation to be halted saying, “Our heritage should come before anything else,” as reported in the London Daily Telegraph.

Blogger David King of New York (on Getting from here to there) commented, “There are many more places to put David than there are to put trains that connect to the station.”

What do you think? Should infrastructure construction be stopped by items of heritage? Is the claimed vibration damage due to tunnelling possible? What are the alternatives? Contact the News Editor: Alex.Conacher@tunnelsandtunnelling.com.