Displaying items by tag: tourists

As hundreds of tourists and Romans took pictures, water began flowing once again at Rome's famed Trevi fountain after a 17-month, 2.2 million euro ($2.4 million) restoration.

The restoration was paid for by the Rome-based Fendi fashion house. Rome's top culture official, Claudio Parisi, said at the fountain's re-opening Tuesday such public-private partnerships are essential to preserve the city's cultural treasures in tight economic times.

From October, Tutankhamun’s golden mask will be off display and his tomb closed to tourists. The boy king’s famous mask is being taken off display at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, to enable conservators to remove epoxy resin, applied to the mask in August 2014 as a way of re-securing its loose beard. Although the beard was not broken, as was widely reported at the time, and the epoxy has not discolored or harmed the mask, it is not the most suitable material for the job, and too much was applied, leaving dried traces visible to viewers.

The blue and gold braided beard on the burial mask of famed pharaoh Tutankhamen was hastily glued back on with epoxy, damaging the relic after it was knocked during cleaning, conservators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo said Wednesday.

The museum is one of the city’s main tourist sites, but in some areas, ancient wooden sarcophagi lay unprotected from the public, while Pharaonic burial shrouds, mounted on walls, crumble from behind open panels of glass. Tutankhamen’s mask, over 3,300 years old, and other contents of his tomb are its top exhibits.

High above the altar in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel, the halo around Jesus Christ's head in Michelangelo's famous frescoes shines with a brighter glow, thanks to a revolutionary new lighting system.

Angels, sybils and prophets in blues, pinks and golds, once lost in the gloom, are brought into sharp relief by 7,000 LED lamps designed specifically for the prized chapel, where red-hatted cardinals have elected new popes since the 15th century.

A state of the art ventilation system has also been installed to protect the frescoes from humidity, enabling up to 2,000 people at a time to safely visit one of the world's top tourist attractions, which draws over six million people a year.

A string of blockbuster shows at  London’s world-renowned museums helped to attract record numbers of tourists to the capital in the first half of this year, according to figures released today.

Tate Modern’s "Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs" exhibition pushed  the number of visits to the gallery to almost 700,000 in the first six months of 2014 — up from 425,000 for the same period last year.

Official figures released today put the capital on course for its most successful tourism year. International tourists made 8.459 million trips to London between January and July, a 7.6 per cent increase on 2013.

The Louvre, the Palace of Versailles and the Musee d'Orsay -- France's top three most visited museums -- will soon open seven days a week, the government said Wednesday.

The measure is expected to come into force between 2015 and 2017, ending a practice that currently sees those top tourist sites closed one day a week, on Monday or Tuesday.

A pair of American tourists were pinched by Italian police when Fiumicino airport authorities in Rome discovered a stolen Pompeii relic in their luggage, reports the Local. The remarkably ill-advised crime rivals our favorite Italian art news story of the year, “Italian Student Smashes Sculpture While Taking Selfie” in its general stupidity.

The massive artifact, which was removed from a building at the historic site, weighed more than 65 pounds, but that wasn’t about to stop the thieves from smuggling it on board an aircraft and back to the States.

Public transport in Venice is like an endless sightseeing tour, and not only for the amount of tourists on the central vaporetto routes.

The waterfront architecture is truly spectacular, from Palladian churches to private palazzos.

And now during the Biennale contemporary artworks and installations are scattered around the city.

Venturing along the waterways leads to some unmissable exhibitions, where art and architecture blend into a beautiful dialogue.

City boosters in this Nordic capital dream of a Guggenheim museum of Finnish wood rising near the Baltic Sea and one day drawing millions of tourists and cruise passengers. But the huge costs of the proposed development are stirring a backlash here against an institution that is ordinarily accustomed to eager suitors.

The proposal for the city of Helsinki to team up with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York to build a museum here is splitting politicians into camps of pro-business supporters seeking the wealth and attention that comes with an international brand, and Social Democrats and other left-of-center party members who are skeptical about shouldering the costs of a 130 million euro ($177 million) development deal.