Artworks hidden under 2,000 years of soot and grime in Petra, Jordan, have been restored.

Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.

Experts from the Courtauld Institute in London have now removed the black grime, uncovering paintings whose “exceptional” artistic quality and sheer beauty are said to be superior even to some of the better Roman paintings at Herculaneum that were inspired by Hellenistic art.

Virtually no Hellenistic paintings survive today, and fragments only hint at antiquity’s lost masterpieces, while revealing little about their colours and composition, so the revelation of these wall paintings in Jordan is all the more significant. They were created by the Nabataeans, who traded extensively with the Greek, Roman and Egyptian empires and whose dominion once stretched from Damascus to the Red Sea, and from Sinai to the Arabian desert.

Such is the naturalistic intricacy of these paintings that the actual species of flowers, birds and insects bursting with life can be identified. They were probably painted in the first century, but may go back further. Professor David Park, an eminent wall paintings expert at the Courtauld, said that the paintings “should make jaws drop”.

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The Telegraph has posted an interesting article about the architectural challenges of saving the Leaning Tower of Pisa from collapsing.

Burland was convinced he had such a solution – a process called soil extraction – and ultimately he won over the rest of the committee. Akin to microsurgery, it entailed drilling out slivers of soil from beneath the northern side of the tower – away from the lean – and allowing gravity to coax the structure back upright. It had the advantage of not touching the tower itself, so keeping the art historians happy.

‘The pressure was immense, a modern wonder of the world was at stake – but I never doubted the logic of soil extraction,’ says Burland, cool as you like. As revealed in The Tower Restored, the procedure was actually pioneered in 1832 by Victorian engineer James Trubshaw on the leaning church-tower of St Chad’s in Nantwich.

Work began in 1999, using delicate, Archimedes-screw drills. At the same time, technicians in a piazza-site trailer monitored data from 120 sensors set up inside and beneath the tower.

Burland now came into his own. He had details of the tower and earth’s every movement faxed twice a day to his office in London (or to wherever he was on holiday – the prof remembers one frantic search for a fax machine while away with his wife in Syria). And after considerable number-crunching, he would advise how much drilling was necessary in the next 12 hours. By the time he called a successful halt, two years and 1,500 faxes later, 70 tons of soil had been removed and the tower had returned to its early 19th-century inclination.

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The Italian government is looking for private sponsors to help pay for restoration work on the famous Colosseum in Rome in exchange for advertising rights.

A string of collapses at the nearby forum have also raised fears about visitor safety and whether the buildings can remain standing for much longer.

However the dire state of public finances in Italy, one of the most heavily indebted countries in Europe, means that funds are short and the government is having to turn to private investors to plug the 25 million euro ($32 million) gap.

“It’s a remarkable experiment,” said Francesco Giro, the undersecretary for Italy’s heritage ministry, which is running the tender with Rome’s city council.

“If all goes to plan, by 2013 the Colosseum will have been cleaned from top to bottom but even more important, it will be fully accessible to visitors,” he said.

The restoration project will see visitors offered multimedia tours of relatively unexplored areas, from the maze of underground chambers where the gladiators and wild animals were kept, to the uppermost terraces with their spectacular views.

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Six giant Mayan figureheads in the Chakanbakan Archaeological Zone in Mexico are set to undergo restoration.

“A team of restorers will begin an integral cleaning in May 2010, followed by plastering and reintegration of small missing parts, as well as consolidation”, informed archaeologist Fernando Cortes, in charge of the archaeological zone.

He added that during conservation work, restorers will take samples of the black pigment used to emphasize the face features, to determine its origin and restore it, since sun, rain, wind and time have damaged it.

Cortes mentioned that these figureheads were found 15 years ago beside the staircase of the main temple known as Nohochbalam. “They sizes vary; the smallest is 2 meters high and 3 wide, while the biggest is 3 meters high and 10 wide.

“We calculate these sculptures were made near 350 BC, becoming the antecedent of those impressive ones found at Kohunlich and other Maya sites”.

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Jerusalem has reopened their popular 16th-century gate to the Old City after the completion of a renovation and cleaning project.

Jaffa Gate, one of four main entrances to the Old City, was built by Jerusalem’s Ottoman rulers and inaugurated in 1538. It is the most common entrance for tourists entering the walled Old City — home to key holy sites in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, as well as a popular outdoor marketplace.

The restoration was part of a $4 million project launched by the Israel Antiquities Authority in 2007 to spruce up all two and a half miles (four kilometers) of the Old City’s walls.

The authority replaced broken stones, reattached an elaborate inscription above the gate and cleaned the facade with lye. Because Jaffa Gate provides one of the few entrances for vehicles, the stones had a decades-old coating of car exhaust residue, said Yoram Saad, who headed the renovation.

The portal stands at a right angle to the western exterior wall of the Old City, made of the same large, 16th-century sand-colored hewn stone blocks. The entrance is about 20 feet (6 meters) high, and the wall rises another 20 feet (6 meters) above it.

The renovation project has proven challenging because of the difficulty in restoring ancient stones and the project’s political and religious overtones.

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