An Italian team has been working since 2013 to restore the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, which Christians say was built on the site where Jesus was born. It’s a mammoth effort, which has aready yielded some surprising results.
With thermal cameras, similar to those used by the military at night, they scanned the walls to see if there was anything behind them, said Giammarco Piacenti, CEO of the Piacenti restoration company which is leading the work. It was hidden for decades at the church on the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born until conservationists uncovered it — an ancient mosaic of an angel. “In that part it was completely different, you could see the angel. We said ‘what is this? It can’t be an angel’,” he told AFP. After peeling back the plaster they uncovered the mosaic, bringing the number of angels in the church to seven.
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