to the St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center.

Many people will drive by the outside of the church, and when they look at the structure, the outside gives no hint whatsoever as to what is contained inside.

And it contains the largest collection of fresco artwork in North America.

This is the same style as the famed Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Some people call it the Sistine Chapel of Rhode Island.

What we see today was not what the parishioners saw back in the day.

There were no fresco paintings.

It was the walls and ceilings were finished in our gray stucco cement.

There were no stained glass windows and there was no marble.

It was a byproduct of the American Industrial Revolution.

At the time in the 19th century, many mills had opened up here in Woonsocket and they needed workers, so they turned north to Canada.

And so St. Ann's itself was the second of the several French Canadian parishes that were opened.

And it was founded in 1890.

And so 1925, they added the stained glass windows, which were imported from Chartreuse, France, and then in the 1940s, pastor at the time decided, "Let's add a a little bit more color to the building."

And so he visited different churches around New England and found the Italian artist Guido Nincheri.

(gentle music) Guido Nincheri was born in Prato, Italy.

His father wanted him to take over the family textile business.

Nincheri had a huge passion for the arts and that's what he wanted to study.

And they had a big argument, and his father beat him with a stick, and it displaced a couple of his vertebrae.

And over several years, he developed a very pronounced hunch.

But he wasn't deterred.

He walked the train tracks from Prato, Italy to Florence with this incredible back pain, and he was homeless for just about a year.

(gentle music) One day, an artist who taught at the famed Academy of Florence, that was founded by the popular Medici family, literally took him into his house and got him into the Academy of Fine Arts.

And he married, and part of the honeymoon, they decided to visit some friends that had come over to the United States.

While he was here in Boston, his father wrote to him and said, "Don't come home."

The political climate of Italy, at the time, with the rise of fascism, things weren't going so well in Europe.

(speaking Italian) - I think part of what Nincheri was so excited about when he came into this building was he saw an opportunity to do his own Sistine Chapel, 'cause the fresco style doesn't present itself often.

(peaceful music) For eight years, there was always wooden scaffolding in the building somewhere.

Some of the interesting faces we have, one of 'em is the parish sexton Alphonse Lavoie, the parish janitor.

He's portrayed as Jonah in "Jonah and the Whale," and when you look at "Jonah and the Whale," he's this very incredible physique, this great body, and that was his body as well.

Those were the days when there was a coal-fired furnace, and so he was in the boiler room, shoveling coal.

The story with the painting of this building has so many similarities to when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.

There was controversy, Nincheri paints Adam and Eve.

The Mother Superior at the time kind of led a little revolt about it because she wasn't happy that these figures were nude.

And he goes to do another painting called "The Rebellion of the Angels," where Archangel Michael and the heavenly angels are casting the rebellious angels into Hell, and in that painting, Michael is piercing one of the rebellious angels, and you can see part of her face, and he based that face on that Mother Superior.

(gentle music) All the faces and the walls and the ceilings, every single face was a parishioner who sat in these pews, or a member of the city of Woonsocket, and what we are saving isn't just a church structure, but it's a scrapbook, it's a snapshot, a moment of time.

These people who were immortalized were textile workers.

These are the people who worked in the mills.

Here we have portraits of the common person, and you don't see that in a lot of places.

- It's remarkable to think