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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.
