<previous On the morning of September 26th, 1997 an earthquake hit the region. The basilica's vaulted ceiling collapsed. It brought down part of the vault of the "Doctors of the Church" painted by Giotto. It took the lives of four people inside the church: two friars and two experts assessing the damage already sustained.

Researchers at The University of California and University of Roma Tre in Rome have developed an image-analysis technique to put the frescoes back together. The system analyzes blocks of pixels on each shard and attempts to match them with the patterns in a photograph of the intact painting. This investigation is part of an ongoing work into content-sensitive image retrieval based on classification by texture from large databases. [See article]