After the 35 lights that decorate the famous Christmas tree in Piazza Duomo in Milan, it is expected on Thursday 20 December at 18.45pm the switching on of the new external lighting system of the Gothic Cathedral symbol of the city.
The inauguration of the internal lighting of the Cathedral took place on 1 May 2015, while that of the Madonnina, the facade and the windows was completed for Christmas 2016. Two years later it was time for the lights that line the perimeter and the upper part of the Cathedral, including roofs and spiers. The project for the new lighting system for the exterior of the Cathedral, which includes the entire perimeter of the Cathedral, the roofs and the spiers, provides for the replacement of the 378 previously installed (non-LED) luminaires with 574 LED projectors: of these , 368 are allocated on the Terraces of the Cathedral and 206 are instead distributed on the poles and the surrounding buildings.
"The Duomo of Milan is a unique building in the world", explained Fedele Confalonieri, president of the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano, "a wonder that in the XNUMXth century made Stendhal leave his house at one in the morning, bewitching him with its illuminated architecture from the moon and therefore certainly deserved a high-level intervention worth a total of almost one million euros".
The project, commissioned by the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo and entrusted in 2016 to Eng. Pietro Palladino of Studio Ferrara Palladino e Associati and approved by the Fine Arts and Landscape Superintendence of Milan, an agreement jointly stipulated last February 1 with the Municipality of Milan and A2A for the enhancement of theexternal lighting of the Cathedral.
The Veneranda Fabbrica took full responsibility for the purchase of the new lighting fixtures for the plant, with an investment of over one million euro. The choice of luminaires, specially made by ERCO for the Cathedral, continued in the name of efficiency and respect for the environment, favoring LED technology. Valerio Camerano, CEO of A2A explained that with the new system and the connection to district heating the Duomo will reduce its annual consumption by 52%, cutting 23.000 tons of CO2 emissions and 9 tons of waste from its energy balance.
“Despite this considerable saving, the new external lighting system of the Milan Cathedral will almost guarantee the 30% more brightness”, continued Eng. Pietro Palladino, “for a composition of light that will shape a truly evocative nocturnal image around the walls and spiers of the church. Shadows are fundamental in architecture, like pauses in music, and their study was a fundamental point of this project. We were looking for deeper shadows that would enhance the plasticity of the architectures and for this we made use of custom-made LED projectors, photometrically very precise, able to reach previously inaccessible points, to avoid the risk of glare always lurking in an urban context and to be calibrated in a capillary way to give shape to a single homogeneous movement".
