After installing the station in Savelli we went on to Campana and found Father Don Salvatore Spataro right away.
The Chiesa Santa Maria Assunta.
The inside of the church, restored with one collection plate of money at a time, was beyond breathtaking. I have been in many impressive churches all over the world, but this one really felt like a church, instead of a football stadium.
The church contained several paintings that were painted in the early 1600's. Sorry about the color. It was the tungsten lighting, and my not adjusting the camera that caused the yellow color.
Now for the good part. Below the church was a crypt. A real crypt where the bones of the town's ancestors were kept -- at least until they moved them to the town cemetery and started restoring the place.
We set up the station in a far corner of the crypt.
Headstones for bones.
Artifacts that were recovered during the restoration of the crypt.
We were out of battery chargers to keep the station running so two batteries connected together were left until someone could get back to Campana and install a battery charger. The two batteries should have kept the station running for several weeks. To complicate things a bit further the GPS cable was too short to make it to the opposite side of the crypt where a small hole in the half-meter thick wall would allow the GPS antenna a view of the sky. The GPS is used to provide accurate time information. Normally the GPS is turned on, and the time of the internal clock locked to the GPS time every 20 minutes. Without it the internal clock of the recorder will drift. If the internal clock is never synchronized then the data from the station cannot be combined accurately with other stations unless you cheat and make a lot of assumptions. We had to start the recorder at the front door of the church, let the GPS and internal clock synchronize, carry the recorder while still connected to the battery down into the crypt, and then connect it to the sensor. When the station is serviced the procedure will have to be reversed. I sent a longer cable after I returned to the States.
Below is Father Don Salvatore Spataro and Nano. Those are not the fires of Hades behind them, but just a streetlight.
2018-03-03