Press

Times Union – April 10, 2008

The two most striking features of the new incarnation of Chianti il Ristorante in Saratoga Springs couldn’t be more different. One has nothing to do with the food and is literally priceless. The other is literally the price of the food.

Set into a glass-fronted vault in the wall of Chianti, which opens Saturday in a ground-floor space of a new condo building called The Lofts, a block west of Broadway in the heart of downtown, is an 18-by-26-inch bronze plaque depicting Christ on the cross. It is a copy of one of the 16 panels on the Porta Santa, or Holy Door, the northernmost entrance to St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican in Rome. According to Chianti’s owner, David Zecchini, recipient of the panel as a gift from his mother, who lives in Rome, it is one of only three known copies in the world, and each of the copies differs in a key way from the panel on the Holy Door. (More on that later.)

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