In 2014 CISA3-CHEI from the University of California, San Diego, set out for Florence, Italy, to diagnose a patient that had no prior medical record, couldn’t be poked or prodded in any way, and hadn’t been in prime condition for more than 800 years.
The ‘patient’ in question is the Baptistery of St. John, a basilica that sits in the Piazza del Duomo, adjacent to the famous Florence Cathedral (known colloquially as “The Duomo”). The team including structural engineering Ph.D. candidates Mike Hess and Mike Yeager of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), had been invited by the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo to conduct a structural 'health assessment' of the building, which was completed in 1128 and was the site where the Italian poet Dante and many other notable Renaissance figures were baptized.
Their resulting 3D digital model depicts a building that has aged gracefully, yet warrants careful and continued evaluation – not surprising considering the Baptistery has experienced several hundred years of settling and is situated in seismically active zone.
But there were indeed big surprises in store for the team, surprises that might have gone unnoticed were it not for the “high-tech gaze” of the advanced multi-spectral, high-resolution tools they used to see behind walls, underground and directly into the past.

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