It was a record, it has to be said. Because when you think that the monument was restored, illuminated and officially unveiled just 50 days after the first town meeting, it was an extraordinary event. Just as extraordinary is the whole story around the re-assessment of the work of Edgardo Simone.

To illuminate the monument faithfully, integrate it into the urban context and bring out the spiritual value of the piece, we first had to study the historical events that inspired the sculptor in his work.

We wanted to completely modify the existing illumination by harmonising the colours of the lights, using many times more floodlights than had been used before, and selecting lighting bodies with extremely advanced technical characteristics in terms of optics and tight beams.

A key aim of the design was to bring out the figures that stand out from the solid marble and focus attention still more on the details, because the sculptor wanted his work to be experienced in 360°.

The dying gladiator, the only sculpture not illuminated from below, is lit more evenly than the monument as a whole, with higher illumination values, since it is the centre of the work both in terms of meaning and position.

The Winged Victory on the other hand, creates an imposing frontal aspect, and we emphasised that in the lighting, while on the back the accent light on the wings is designed to create a highly visible and recognisable landmark from right across the town of Brindisi and even to shipping entering the port.

The extraordinary post-restoration illumination was the inspiration for the Great Italian Works, both in terms of solutions and in terms of detailed study:

in Italy, mid-sized monuments such as this are never “worthy” enough to be given much attention in the way of technical lighting. It is usually all very perfunctory and hampered by local authority standards, which generally set tight limits for the sake of urban context and historical memory. In this case, however, we are quite sure that the “grand”, very technical approach has given enormous added value to the end result.