60 Minutes Transcript: Restoring the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi

Saturday marked the 800th anniversary of the death of one of Christianity’s superstars, Saint Francis of Assisi. Every year, millions of visitors flock to the basilica in Assisi to celebrate the miracles attributed to one of Italy’s patron saints. That the church is still standing is a miracle itself. It has survived war, fire and flood. But nothing left more devastation than a pair of powerful earthquakes that struck in 1997 — cratering the roof and leaving countless art treasures permanently damaged. Now, a team of art historians and software engineers have joined forces with the Franciscan Friars to try to finish the restoration — this time with the help of digital wizardry and artificial intelligence. We had to find out more.

Seven centuries ago, the friars knew a good location when they saw it. What was once a barren hill in Umbria where criminals swung from gallows was transformed into this: the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, the magnificent resting place of one of Christianity’s most beloved saints. Sometimes called the original hippie, Francis rejected his family’s wealth for a life of poverty. Medieval masters couldn’t resist the story of the radical monk and lined up to paint it. But in 1997 the great church almost came crashing down. 

Two quakes hit one after another. A section of the soaring roof collapsed. A thick mushroom cloud filled with the soot of priceless art rolled down the aisle. Four people were killed by falling rubble.

Friar Guiulio Cesareo: Everything was destroyed, was unsafe. Really, I remember. I cannot forget it. I saw the arch dancing like this.

Bill Whitaker: A big stone arch like this?

Guilio Cesareo: Yes, yes, yes. I think people cannot believe it, but I saw it. 

Friar Guilio Cesareo — like Julius Cesar but with an “o” he told us — was a student here at the time. Earthquakes still scare him.

Friar Guilio Cesareo: I am always terrified. 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. The damage was a shock for the Italian country.

It was a shock that galvanized a desperate salvage operation. Restorers worked to heal the broken bodies of the saints. It was painstaking work and not all the pieces fit. Thirty years later, some of the frescos are still pock-marked, the walls bare. No wonder the friars jumped at the chance to use 21st century technologies to restore their 13th century home.

Giovanni Borelli: Right now we are digitizing in a super-high-definition this fresco — which is St. Francis talking to the Arles chapter

Giovanni Borelli is leading the project to create a digital twin of the basilica. Borelli is the CTO of Haltadefinizione, a technology company that specializes in ultra-high-definition gigapixel photography. 

Bill Whitaker: This is no ordinary camera I take it?

Giovanni Borelli: No, it’s not. No, it’s not. It’s a robotic camera that we use to take a super-high-definition images. So 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.

Bill Whitaker: What is a gigapixel?

Giovanni Borelli: You know, you have a mobile camera. It’s about 50 megapixels. We are three order of magnitude above. We are in billion pixels.

Bill Whitaker: Wow. So you with your camera and the pictures can see things that the human eye cannot?

Giovanni Borelli: Yeah. 

Using cameras, drones and lasers, Borelli’s team will take hundreds of thousands of pictures, stitching them together to create the most high resolution 3D blueprint of a building ever made. If disaster strikes this earthquake zone again, restorers will have an exact road map to rebuild. 

Bill Whitaker: Are you photographers or are you computer experts?

Giovanni Borelli: We are both.

For Sergio Fusetti, a survivor of the 1997 quakes and chief restorer, those words are bittersweet. For him, high-tech help arrived too late. He asked us to follow him down a narrow passageway to the hidden storage rooms beneath the church. The lock was rusted — no one had been here in months. Then, another dusty hallway, another lock … until finally, Fusetti showed us why we were here: a rare look at more than 80,000 fragments from the 1997 quakes — all neatly catalogued — and in purgatory.

Bill Whitaker: You have no idea where these go?

Sergio Fusetti: No

Bill Whitaker: No 

No, he said, we have tried everything. He showed us some of the larger pieces still stored in a box. 

Bill Whitaker: So it’s like a jigsaw puzzle?

Exactly, he said.

Fusetti told us he’d toiled for years trying to finish the job. but despite his best efforts he’s left with a heap of plaster chips — each an irreplaceable part of a 13th century masterpiece. 

Bill Whitaker: When you are able to fit a piece back where it belongs, does it feel like a restoration or does it feel like a resurrection? 

It was an ongoing gamble, he told us. Sometimes you work all day and place just one fragment. But sometimes we found the pieces and it was deeply satisfying.

Fusetti says he’s gone as far as humanly possible. Only artificial intelligence can help us now, he told us.

Upstairs, the digital calvary was galloping on. Giovanni Borelli told us he plans on using AI to fit together the leftover chips. And to tackle other problems:

Giovanni Borelli: Like cracks in the paintings, discoloration — layers of paint, lifting. 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.

Bill Whitaker: And with AI?

Giovanni Borelli: With AI, minutes. 

But Borelli has more in mind than just preserving the basilica. The company hopes to use AI to make art more accessible, starting by making a trip to the museum more like the movies:

The same technology is being used to open up Italy’s hidden treasures. One day last June we descended 60 feet beneath the streets of Rome. 

Under an ordinary parking lot was something extraordinary: the remains of thermal baths built by a Roman emperor.

A laser scanner captured details of rooms with 30-foot ceilings and delicate mosaics. These ultra-high-definition cameras have revealed hidden chambers and passageways forgotten by history.

And then there’s time travel. 

Bill Whitaker: Press crown to select. OK.

Giovanni Borelli: You got the menu on? 

Bill Whitaker: Yeah

We ended up in ancient Pompeii — at a party. 

Bill Whitaker: Looks like they’re having fun at this party. The wine is flowing.

With virtual reality goggles, visitors can look their ancient hosts in the eye. 

Bill Whitaker: Somebody is playing the pipes. Somebody else is playing a harp. People getting drunk

Borelli hopes to use VR headsets to allow users to step inside some of Italy’s most famous paintings.

Bill Whitaker: What a room. It’s like you wanna step outside into the garden. This is one grand dining room I’ll tell you.

Bill Whitaker: Ah! That was fantastic.

Giovanni Borelli: You’re back again.

Bill Whitaker: I’m back again. Nice trip to ancient Pompeii. 

Giovanni Borelli: When I founded one of the companies that built this kind of technologies I was a software engineer — pretty new to the art world. And the main question that I was focused on is a kind of philosophical one: How good can the digital representation of a physical object be? What is missing?

Bill Whitaker: So it sounds like you’re trying to put the soul into the technology?

Giovanni Borelli: Yeah, yeah. You can say it, say that, yeah, it’s nice.

Borelli admits the technology can’t duplicate the emotional impact of standing in front of a work of art. not yet. But strapping on VR goggles could make lessons like this a thing of the past. 

Bill Whitaker: There are scenes with people sitting and listening to sermons. You could actually enter that group?

Giovanni Borelli: Yeah why not. You can have a walk around — even fly around. Why be stuck to the ground? You can walk on the ceiling and see how the stars feel under your feet. You can run, let your fantasy run wild. 

Bill Whitaker: I can imagine this would have made me a much better student.

Giovanni Borelli: Me too.

As the sun set on another azure sky in Assisi, we followed in the sandaled-steps of the friars who’ve walked these halls for centuries. We wanted to ask Friar Giulio Cesaro if he had any qualms about using artificial intelligence as a custodian for the legacy of Saint Francis.

Friar Giulio Cesareo: The biggest benefit for me, it’s not the technology for itself. The technology is not the purpose –

Bill Whitaker: It’s a tool —

Friar Giulio Cesareo: It’s a tool to reach the goal. The goal is sharing this treasure, which is a treasure of faith and beauty. Technology helps us to go farther away, to reach more people than we could before. And in a more efficient way. 

The basilica’s digital twin will be complete next year and available to the public. The friars told us they’re hoping it will turbo-boost the spirit of Saint Francis — both in the heavens and the cloud.

Produced by Heather Abbott. Associate producer, Paulina Smolinski. Broadcast associate, Marcos Caballero. Edited by Sean Kelly.

Read the full story about the friars.