2017-01-23 18:45:00

(Vatican Radio) The new director of the Vatican museums, Barbara Jatta, presented a new multimedia web site to journalists at the Vatican press office on Monday. The user-friendly site, available in Italian, English, French, Spanish and German, contains thousands of images plus over fifty videos and virtual tours and has taken almost three years to complete.

Listen to our report:

Jatta explained that the new site is a ‘work in progress’ with some four thousand of the Vatican’s treasures available to discover and explore online. Over the course of the coming year, she said, she hoped all 20.000 works which are on display in the museums will also be available for consultation online. She said that is only a fraction of the 200.000 works of art belonging to the museums, many of which are kept in in store rooms or other locations unavailable for public viewing.

Also present at the press conference was Mgr Dario Viganò, head of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications which has been working together with the museums to produce the new multimedia website. He spoke of the significance of the museums as part of the Holy See’s cultural diplomacy, underlining the role of “art as a place of dialogue and encounter”

You can find the new website at www.museivaticani.va