Paolo Mora

In 1988 Paolo Mora was asked to direct the fieldwork for lifting the Orpheus mosaic at Nea Paphos, a joint project of the Getty Conservation Institute and the Cyprus Department of Antiquities. The project volume calls him the former Chief Restorer of the Istituto Centrale del Restauro in Rome and lists him as a private conservator in Rome by 1991¹.

The mosaic had been found in 1984 and fully excavated in 1985 by Demetrios Michaelides. It was subsiding over an underlying wall and its setting-bed had loosened, so the project decided to lift it in one piece by the rolling technique, which was uncommon, and to use the work for training¹. In August 1988 "Professor Paolo Mora" inspected the mosaic with the conservators Jan Kosinka, Giorgio Capriotti and Lorenza D'Alessandro, and planned the operation with Michaelides and Nicholas Stanley Price¹.

Phase 1 ran from 5 September to 14 October 1988. Mora taught in it alongside Laura Mora and other instructors, and the lifting was combined with instruction in mosaics conservation. Phase 2, the reinstallation of the mosaic in May and June 1989, was directed on site by Kosinka¹. Mora signed the foreword to the 1991 volume, which says that the rolling technique will not suit every mosaic but that conservators should know it¹.