Vatican hopes Web site appeals to new generation

VATICAN CITY -- The Sistine Chapel is now online.\nThe Vatican put its enormous art collection on the Web on Tuesday, launching a new site for the Vatican Museums that it hopes will attract more tourists while also disseminating the church's message around the globe.\nThe site allows visitors to take a virtual reality tour of some of the dozen museums and galleries that make up the Vatican collection, zooming in on a frescoed panel in the Raphael Rooms or viewing Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel with a three-dimensional video.\nImages of the works are accompanied by descriptions translated into Italian, French, English, Spanish and German.\nVatican officials said the goal of the site was to give potential tourists, scholars and curious Web browsers a sampling of the Vatican's holdings while taking advantage of the Internet and the "universal language" of art to spread Pope John Paul II's message.\n"The tool of the Web, with its enormous potential, allows us to get closer to an ever-growing number of people to spread the message of evangelization around the world," said Cardinal Edmund Casimir Szoka, whose office oversees the Vatican's museums and galleries.\nThe site was launched nearly eight years after the Vatican itself leaped into cyberspace with the Web site www.vatican.va, mostly devoted to Vatican documents and information about the Roman curia. While the new site has a Vatican Museum link, it contained little information.\nNow through the same link, visitors can view entire galleries of the Egyptian and Etruscan museums, the Pinacoteca painting gallery, the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel -- part of a collection that the U.N. culture agency, UNESCO, has recognized for its place in the world's cultural patrimony.\nThe site also has information about museum hours and publications. There is no way to buy museum tickets online, but museum director Francesco Buranelli said that could be possible in the future, as could an online museum gift shop.\nDuring a press conference to launch the site, Vatican officials acknowledged that the Holy See was not immune to hackers, who make about 30 attempts a week to hack into the site. The most frequent culprits are young engineering students from the United States and an insomniac Franciscan monk who apparently has tried to get in at night.\n"It makes you smile," said Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, head of the Vatican's patrimony office. "He couldn't sleep."\nNone of the hacking attempts have been successful.\nEach month, the Vatican site registers 50 million hits, he said.\nStill under construction is a part of the Web site dedicated to the Vatican's Secret Archives, including documents concerning the Vatican's disputed role in World War II.\nCelli said that site would be ready in "the near future," but he noted that the museum site had been in the works since 1998.