Ferdinando Fuga. Polychrome marble floor.

Ferdinando Fuga. Polychrome marble floor.

When the abbess Sister Teresa Caracciolo had the basilica renovated in the Baroque style, she also instructed Ferdinando Fuga to put in a new floor that would match the architectural and pictorial taste of the walls and the large figured vault. The original floor of simple marble slabs was eventually covered with innumerable marble decorations and epigraphs. Fuga worked at the floor from 1761 to 1763 with the assistance of Giuseppe Alviani. The marble workers were Antonio de Luca and Gennaro de Martino, who only used prized marbles, as specified in their contract: “white marbles of Carrara, brecciato marble from the same place, breccia from Serravezza, Verona yellow, white and red from France, yellow and black from Portovenere, and some pieces of antique red”. The floor’s tripartite design used to match that of the eighteenth-century ceiling, but the correspondence of lines and sense of proportional balance is lost today.