Another one of Florence’s must-see monuments, the church of Santa Croce, has turned into a museum with a 3 euro ticket price for visitors. Often called the Florentine Pantheon, around 1 million visitors per year crowd in to see the tombs of the city’s most famous sons: Galileo, Michelangelo and Dante (though his bones are buried elsewhere) and the frescoes of Giotto in the Bardi chapel.

This is the latest of four major religious monuments (the Duomo and baptistery, Santa Maria Novella and San Lorenzo) in the city to charge an admission price for visitors. Those wishing to pray or attend mass are still let in, without charge, from separate entrances. Critics say this is just one more step into turning one of the most famous cities in Italy definitively into an amusement park.

"Basically places of worship are becoming places of entertainment," said Antonio Paolucci the official responsible for Florence’s artistic heritage. "Unfortunately, museums have also lost their primary function — as places of education. I think about 98% of visitors today, foreign and Italian, enter without understanding the value of what they see."

Fees are unlikely to bother tourists on package tours — who often pay entrance fees in the tour price and have group reservations — but deter single visitors who will have to shell out money at every monument after waiting in long lines. Proponents of the fees say that the income will help preserve monuments for future generations and keep out the uninterested. On the first day the ticket office opened in Santa Croce, some 6,000 tickets were sold for profits of 18,000 euro or roughly $16,000 USD.

Related resources:
City Secrets: Florence, Venice, and the Towns of Italy
Tired of lines? Try off the beaten path sights….

The Axum Obelisk in Rome, a much-contested Ethiopian treasure, has been shattered into pieces by lightning.
Taken by order of Benito Mussolini in 1937, the Ethiopian government has been trying to get it back for over half a century. Lightning struck the deserted piazza around 1 a.m., probably attracted as much by the shape as the steel braces added when the monument was transported.
More than 1,000 years old, the monument once crowned the city of Aksum, then center of trade in ivory, animal skins and grain in the ancient Ethiopian empire.

The Obelisk was the latest in a series of heated arguments for return of stolen art — one that found Italians as the accused. Owning over 60% of the world’s art treasures, according to UNESCO, usually places Italy in the position of petitioning for its own looted treasures. One recent example: after years of negotiations, the Getty Museum in California was prevailed upon to return 500 terracotta and bronze pieces to a Calabrian museum in 2001.

Foot-dragging by Italian authorities meant that agreements to return the obelisk to Ethiopia, signed as early as 1947, never amounted to action. Italian government officials, most vocally Vittorio Sgarbi, have protested the restitution both because of political instability in the African region as well as complications in shipping the 178-ton monument.

Placed at the center of piazza di Porta Capena, close to the Circus Maximus, Italian Culture Minister Giulio Urbani told newspapers the 78-foot sculpture will be restored and sent home.

www.ethiopiaonline.net/obelisk
More on the history & protests…

Filling a gap left 50 years ago, the Garden of Delights at Rome’s Borghese Gallery will get back clones of two statues. These high-tech copies of Priapos and Flora bear chisel marks and slight imperfections from the hand of Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. They were made using a laser scanning technique which copies and reproduces the surface on resin. Models are first made in foam, molded into plaster and then cast using resin filled with marble dust.?Just shy of 7 ft. tall, the copycat versions weigh 200 kilos, practically nothing compared to the marble originals.

Though not considered masterpieces, the statues will close a gap left in the entrance to one of Rome’s most famous museums. The originals, sold by heirs to pay debts, are currently displayed in New York’s Metropolitan museum. Flora and Priapos will rejoin the half circle on May 20, to kick off celebrations for the museum’s 100th birthday. Ethical considerations which arise from these exact copies are the subject of an international symposium on the same day.

www.satellitemodels.com/html/portfolio.html
Take a look at the foam statues..

After more than 30 years of deliberation, the Italian government approved a controversial project to prevent Venice from being devastated by floods.
Named after Moses the biblical figure, the project consists of 79 moveable floodgates weighing 300 tons each which rise to part the sea surrounding Venice when high tides arrive. According to proponents, these dykes will protect La Serenissima from flooding which is now four times more frequent than it was 100 years ago.
The design of the $2.3 billion project, whose name is also an acronym for “experimental electromechanical module” in Italian, was first presented in 1989 and has since been the object of lively debate. Environmentalists have opposed the project as costly and harmful but the proposal gained momentum last year after a team of independent scientists decided it was the best way to keep Venice afloat. Moses won’t be a quick fix: Venice be plagued by flooding ("acqua alta") for at least another 8-10 years while the gates are under construction.

Related resources:
www.salve.it/uk/index.html
More on Moses and the Venetian Lagoon…

2,333 art objects stolen in 10 months*
755 objects recovered
12 people arrested
1 deal for citizen patrol

4,000 members of environmentalist group ?Italia Nostra? have been enlisted by the Carabinieri as watchdogs to prevent art thefts. The agreement also includes an unusual ?theft-awareness training? program?to educate clergy against selling art objects to save church coffers.
“It constitutes theft, but often they don?t realize it. These artworks belong to everyone, not just the church,” Marshal Sergio Banchellini told reporters.
The deal was struck last week in Lombardy, a province with a growing number of disappearing masterpieces, but is expected include volunteers Italy-wide by the end of May 2000.
*(2000,Lombardy)
www.italianostra.org/eroe.htm
The ‘hero’s page’ spotlights citizen-guardians…

Michelangelo was fond enough of his Moses statue to take it off the tomb of Julius II so people could admire it properly. Now you can take a close look at the monumental statue thanks to web cams. Web cams documenting the restoration of the marble statue, completed in the early 1500s, announced with much fanfare in November 2000, were just fired up a few days ago. Never mind. Enter the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome where the statue is housed and click on the photos to get in even closer…Extras: A manoverable web cam on Michelangelo’s prisoners in the Accademia in Florence, calendar by Helmut Newton, maxi puzzle quiz, e-cards (in the press section)
In English & Italian. www.progettomose.it