Croce's comeback plan relies on competitive pricing, a bigger sales force (up 40% to 130 people since 1999) and, most critical of all, new stent designs.

FORBES: Cardiac Comeback

For more than six centuries, the brilliantly frescoed walls of Florence's Basilica of Santa Croce functioned as what its current rector, Father Antonio Di Marcantonio, calls "medieval PowerPoint": scenes from the Bible and saints' lives illustrating the sermons that Franciscan friars preached to largely illiterate congregations.

WSJ: A Heavenly View From On High | Basilica of Santa Croce | Agnolo Gaddi | By Francis X. Rocca

Hence the excitement over the recent cleaning of the frescoes in Santa Croce's main chapel and the news that the restorers' scaffolding will remain in place for most of 2013, allowing visitors to see Agnolo Gaddi's late-14th-century fresco cycle, "The Legend of the True Cross, " from the vantage point of the artist himself.

WSJ: A Heavenly View From On High | Basilica of Santa Croce | Agnolo Gaddi | By Francis X. Rocca

S. Eliot, Jean Cocteau, Benedetto Croce, James Burnham, Luigi Pirandello and Giovanni Gentile, along with such celebrities as Lloyd George, the Duke of Windsor and Lord Rothermere.

FORBES: Men Blinded by Their Brains

From there we can see dozens of rectangular slabs set into the pavement, marking the burial places of centuries of Florentine families, and along the walls, funerary monuments to some of the greatest names in Italian history, including Dante, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo and Rossini, which make Santa Croce the Italian equivalent of Paris's Pantheon or London's Westminster Abbey, a shrine to the so-called lay saints of a modern nation-state.

WSJ: A Heavenly View From On High | Basilica of Santa Croce | Agnolo Gaddi | By Francis X. Rocca