FLORENCE, Italy — Imagine a job that lets you get up close and personal — really, really up close and personal — with one of the world’s most famous statues.
It is one perk of being the in-house restorer of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy, where Eleonora Pucci’s task is to regularly dust Michelangelo’s David, which she described recently as exhilarating, if somewhat nerve-racking.
“To be able to contribute, even in a small way, to the conservation of David’s beauty” makes hers “the best job in the world,” Ms. Pucci said. “Is there anything greater than passing on beauty?”
It was early last Monday, the one day the Galleria is closed to the public, and the clanging of metal echoed throughout the museum as a specialized team built a scaffold tower in the airy rotunda that housed the David. Over the course of the morning, the tower would be gingerly repositioned so that Ms. Pucci could reach the 17-foot-high statue from all sides.
