In the last decade of the 19th century, reawakening in appreciation of the late antique monuments in Ravenna brought their precarious state of preservation to light. Corrado Ricci, the head of the first Superintendence of Monuments of Italy from 1897, tried to remedy to the situation with a massive restoration campaign from 1898 to 1911.
The technical and artistic grounding of the workers engaged in the restoration was a crucial element, and a new generation of experts trained at the Academy of Fine Arts went to work in Ravenna.
Mosaicist Giuseppe Zampiga (1860-1934) and painter and illustrator Alessandro Azzaroni (1857-1947) were the two most outstanding figures that worked under the leadership of Corrado Ricci: these were a pair of restoration artists with extraordinary practical and artistic skills.