A team of volunteers armed with special lasers are working to restore ancient relics in Italy to their former glory.
With several significant cultural relics still standing, Italy is often called an “open air museum,” with visitors able to get up close and personal with monuments of the past.
Unfortunately, many visitors seem compelled to leave their mark, with graffiti posing a problem for many of the country’s major cities.
But Italian company El.En. has come up with a way to safely remove this unwanted legacy, donating their hand-held machines to a volunteer group that aims to clean up the country’s famous facades.
Called the "Fondazione Angeli del Bello Onlus," or the Non-Profit Angels of Beauty, the volunteers are working to restore the past by erasing the present -- removing graffiti from ancient buildings using a specialized optical fibre laser system called the Laser Blaster.
Usually it takes heavy duty chemicals and plenty of scrubbing to remove graffiti, which can be damaging to the surfaces, but the laser is capable of safely cleaning marble and other surfaces.
Removing only microns worth of material for each pulse of the laser, restoration specialists are able to remove rust, crust, tarnishing, and more.
El.En., which designs and builds specialized medical and industrial lasers, created a new division called Light for Art to develop lasers to restore ancient paintings and stone materials.
Over time the team has worked to refine the system to work on metals, ceramics, wood and textiles.
While the systems are proving effective at cleaning up Florence, volunteers say that some of the areas they have cleaned have already been revandalized.
“I’d like young people to see how much time we have to put in to take this off,” one volunteer said.
Previously the systems have been used to restore famous monuments like Nepal’s Patan Royal Palace, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Palace of Versailles, and more.
