Exterior Façades of the Spanish Embassy

Projects | Restoration

Restoration of “Palazzo di Spagna” (lot I)

Headquarters of the Spanish Embassy in Vatican City. The recently completed restoration project has enhanced the chromatic uniformity of the whole façade, giving the structure an hypothetical “stone” interpretation and creating a continuum with the travertine base.

The result that we have obtained is quite different both from the original building and from the latest restoration in the IX century, as both projects were based on two different colours that allowed to distinguish ashlar works and cornices from the background; by doing so, all architectural elements had both structural and decorative value.

The present work transforms the rigid IX century scheme, whose feature was the clear distinction between the base and the elevation, by replacing the latest quartz paint with a lime and travertine powder colouring; thanks to this intervention every element can be perceived as a decorative relief of a whole façade, as we can find in some travertine covered stately Roman palaces (Palazzo della Cancelleria).

The techniques used for the exterior finishing were directly inspired by the one of the building planners’ writings: the Architect Francesco Borromini.

As a matter of fact, in one of these writings, he explains how to make a faux travertine finishing by using a dough called “colla brodata”: a mixture of powdered travertine and white lime based grout. The mixture, when applied with an artistic technique on parts of a plaster wall, using the tip of the brush, can actually achieve the feel of real travertine.

Nowadays, the renewal of such a historical technique attributes to the intervention a high cultural calibre, whereas in the past it was used because a whole travertine cladding would have been too expensive.