Twenty thousand visitors a day are taking their toll on Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel masterpieces. At the conclusion of a summer project to remove four years of dust from the Sistine Chapel's famed walls and ceiling, the director of the Vatican Museums cautioned that "excessive" traffic without sufficient counter-measures spells bad news for future viewers. In Friday's edition of L'Osservatore Romano, Vatican Museums director Antonio Paolucci detailed efforts in July and August of this year to clean "possibly the most known and consequently most used and 'consumed' place of art in the world." He described a massive effort that took 30 specialists, working in rotations during the night, nearly a month to complete.

It had been four years since the last "dusting," he noted, and the staff removed "unimaginable quantities of dust and sediment" that had collected on surfaces, resulting from an average of 20,000 visitors per day.

Noting controversies accompanying the scope, method and products used in the cleaning efforts that originally restored the Sistine Chapel's treasures in the 1980s and '90s, Paolucci said that these questions are no longer an issue now that their effectiveness has been proven over time.

However, today, he explained, they are dealing with the "excessive anthropic pressure," that is, too many visitors, for the climate and pollution control measures that are currently in place.

"If we want to conserve the Sistine in acceptable conditions for the next generations," Paolucci warned, "this is the challenge that we must defeat ..." This challenge is "more arduous," he added, than those posed during the restorations of the 20th century.

Ironically, there was also an additional article in the same newspaper on Friday announcing the extension of visiting hours on certain days in September to include evening visits.

Google  will scan up to 1 million old books in national libraries in Rome and Florence, including works by astronomer Galileo Galilei, in what's being described as the first deal of its kind.Officials from Google and the Italian culture ministry said it was the first time Google Books and a culture ministry have had such a partnership.

Culture Ministry official Mario Resca says the deal will help save the books' content forever and noted that the 1966 Florence flood ruined thousands of books in the Tuscan city's library.

He said digitizing books from before 1868 will help spread Italian culture throughout the world.

Google will cover the costs of the scanning of the books, all of them out-of-copyright Italian works, including 19th-century literature and 18th-century scientific volumes.

The Italian libraries already had embarked on their own project to put their collections online, and so far digital catalogues of some 285,000 book titles and other information have been created.

 French film ’The First Cry’ is a feature-length documentary directed by Gilles de Maistre. It follows pregnant women all around the world, as they live, work, and give birth

  Focus Features has released the trailer for Thomas Balmes‘ documentary Babies online. Based on an original idea by Alain Chabat, Babies simultaneously follows four babies around the world - from birth to first steps.

The children are, respectively, in order of on-screen introduction: Ponijao, who lives with her family near Opuwo, Namibia; Bayarjargal, who resides with his family in Mongolia, near Bayanchandmani; Mari, who lives with her family in Tokyo, Japan; and Hattie, who resides with her family in the United States, in San Francisco. Re-defining the nonfiction art form, Babies joyfully captures on film the earliest stages of the journey of humanity that are at once unique and universal to us all.

The trailer is just too cute.  I guarantee the trailer will put a smile on your face.

Leading magazines for upcoming events and happenings are regularly published and there are weekly Rome event guides that are readily available. They contain up-to-date listings of events throughout Italy, with a focus on Rome and are aimed specifically at tourists and visitors. These magazines are a useful source for shopping, dining and entertainment - providing you with a huge choice of things to see and do in Rome.

Firmly rooted in the European treaties, multilingualism is the reflection of the cultural and linguistic diversity of the European Union. It also makes the European institutions more accessible and transparent for the general public, which constitutes a guarantee for the success of the EU's democratic system.

The European Parliament differs from the other EU institutions through its obligation to ensure the highest possible degree of multilingualism. All EU citizens must be able to refer to legislation directly concerning them in the language of their country. Furthermore, since every European citizen has the right to stand for election to the European Parliament, it is unreasonable to require Members to have a perfect command of one of the common languages. The right of each Member to read parliamentary documents, to follow debates and to speak in his/her own language is expressly recognised in Parliament's Rules of Procedure. In addition, in its role as legislator the European Parliament is obliged to guarantee that the linguistic quality of all the laws which it adopts is beyond reproach in all official languages.

The Treaty provisions also allow all European citizens to follow Parliament's work, to ask questions and to receive replies in their own language.

How many languages are used in the European Parliament?