As the industry accounts for 70 per cent of the area’s income, that’s a devastating blow.”By 2000, he hopes, the earthquake will be a distant memory, and pilgrims will once again throng the streets and churches of the small, pink-hued Umbrian town. “But before that happens, our landmarks have to be intact,” he says. “It’s vital.”On a table in a cavernous, vaulted basement deep beneath the basilica is a fragment of masonry which measures four inches by six. There’s a face painted on it, the chubby, smirking face of an angel which has spent most of its 700-year life 20 metres above ground, hidden in a leafy frieze, gazing up at a huge St Jerome in a quarter-section of a roof vault. It was the only face to survive the earthquake intact.”It’s clearly the work of a master,” says Paola Passalacqua, picking up the fragment and running her finger over the intricate lines of paint around the mouth and eyes with a mixture of familiarity and reverence.

Passalacqua, the Technical Director of the restoration, has overseen the sifting of the rubble, the sorting of the coloured pieces, the first tentative steps towards fitting the tens of thousands of fragments back together.For Passalacqua and her 20-strong team of restorers the pieces have become intricate clues to the artist’s work “It could be early Giotto: we’ll never know. But it’s by a great master, that’s for sure,” she says, stroking the angel. “They painted on to damp plaster, and they were painting blind. The colour soaked in, and until it dried they could only see the faintest shadow of the finished work.

It took extraordinary skill to slap on brushstrokes with that kind of confidence.”The multicoloured bits and pieces – of St Jerome, and of the eight saint frescos which peeled off the arch over the basilica’s front door – are lying in tray after plastic tray in the basement, waiting to be slotted into their rightful places in the immense jigsaw. On each long table is a life-size photograph of a different saint. Three white-coated assistants have dotted lumps of appropriately coloured masonry – discouragingly few of them – about on top of the photos Paola Passalacqua is unfazed by the gaps. “It does seem unlikely we’ll get them back together, doesn’t it?” she says airily “But we have our timetable. These sections will be back where they belong by Christmas 1999.”Not so Cimabue’s fresco of St Matthew, which bounced off an altar in its 22m fall from the vault. This additional bump turned much of the painting to dust; few of the salvaged pieces are more than a centimetre square The fragments now fill 1,000 plastic trays in the basement. Even the confident Ms Passalacqua is not prepared to make predictions about this bit of restoration: “I don’t know when we’ll have it ready, but it certainly won’t be by Holy Year.

No way.” The Cimabue, she says, was “a problem far greater than any restorer has ever had to deal with. Though it is hard for a restorer to admit that a machine can do the job better than a well-trained eye, it was clear from the start that a computerised solution had to be found.”The solution, the first of its kind in the world, was provided by the Istituto Centrale di Restauro (ICR) in Rome, Rome University’s engineering department and the alternative energy board ENEA. It is a computer programme that reads and stores the colours, and even the direction of brushstrokes, on each tiny piece of the mosaic. Once a batch of fragments has been cleaned, stabilised (Cimabue painted in powdery tempera, not in the more resistant fresco of the vault paintings) and inserted into black-painted flower- arranging foam to hold it steady, the whole is photographed and computer- catalogued. When all the pieces are ready, matching them to the whole original should, restorers hope, be child’s play.On the top layers of the labyrinthine scaffolding which fills the upper church, masons and restorers are piping reinforcing mortar through lengths of tubing which have been inserted into cracks in the brickwork of the vaults.