How tourists are leaving their mark on the world’s largest palace: Visitors blamed for graffiti and theft at the 1,200-room Baroque home of the Bourbon kings of Naples

The world’s largest royal palace is under threat from vandals and looters, with damages so bad the local mayor is calling on the Italian army to step in to protect it.

Reggia de Caserta, a former royal residence, is falling into ruins as a result of light-fingered tourists and time taking its toll on the giant palace without the funds for even the most urgent repairs.

The palace, located in Caserta, 20 miles north of Naples, boasts 1,200 rooms, two dozen state apartments, a grand park with waterfalls and several famous gardens as well as paintings and sculptures which has attracted art lovers for centuries.

 

Royal protection: Reggia di Caserta, is falling to ruins as a result of lack of funds and years of vandalism and looting, and the government is now being urged to send the Italian army to protect it

 

 

Stone guards: Magnificent marble statues and fearsome lions no longer scare off thieves and vandals who have helped see the palace fall apart by stealing parts of the interior and spraying graffiti on the walls

 

On-screen dazzle: The throne hall inside the palace which has been used as a set for several Hollywood blockbusters, including Star Wars and Mission Impossible

Built in the mid-18th century for the Bourbon kings of Naples, after a design by architect Luigi Vantielli made to rival the Versailles, it took nearly a century to complete.

In 1997 it made it onto UNESCO’s world heritage site, and was described by the organisation as ‘the swan song of the spectacular art of the Baroque, from which it adopted all the features needed to create the illusions of multidirectional space.’

Reggia de Caserta has played both the home of Queen Amidala and Queen Jamilla in the latest Star Wars trilogy, featured in the film version of Angels and Demons and doubled up as the Vatican in Mission Impossible III.

Despite the honours and Hollywood fame, visitor numbers which used to hit 500,000 per annum, are dwindling by 50,000 a year as a result of poor maintenance, according to the Sunday Times.

Its annual budget of under €500,000 (£426,000) is not enough to keep up with the constant repairs, nor to pay for sufficient security.

 

Royal nap: One of the bedrooms in Reggia di Caserta which, despite its fame and hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, is falling apart

 

The library in Reggia de Caserya, a 1,200-room palace built in the 18th century for the Bourbon kings of Naples, is at risk from visitors with sticky fingers

 

Suffering: One of the bedrooms in the palace, located in Caserta, about 20 miles north of Naples

 

 

The artworks inside the former royal palace, such as these at the ‘Great Staircase of Honour’ may be at risk, according to the mayor of Caserta

Plea for aid: The mayor of the town of Caserta wants a 24-hour police guard and for the government to bring in the Italian army to protect the palace and its treasures

Graffiti can be found all over the palace, marble structures are collapsing as a result of rusting iron clamps and thefts are common.

The lack of security cameras has been blamed for a number of recent fires and the palace’s court theatre has been closed for over a decade.

Now the mayor of Caserta, Pio Del Gaudio, is demanding ‘immediate attention’ from the Italian government urging them to supply 24-hour police protection and to consider drafting in the army to guard the palace.

Local arts chiefs blame tourists for the damage, saying they lack manners and respect for the site.

‘The decay is due to the incivility of thousands of people who came from nearby areas,’ Paola Raffaella David, superintendent for the heritage sites in Caserta, said.

 

Diving numbers: Reggia di Caserta attracts 500,000 visitors per year, a dumber which is dwindling by about 50,000 per annum as a result of the decay of the palace

 

Honoured site: The magnificent palace and its famous gardens saw Reggia de Caserta enter UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites in 1997

 

 

– dailymail.co.uk

British Library sets out to archive the web

The library is publicising its new project by showcasing just a sliver of its content – 100 websites. Photo / Thinkstock

Capturing the unruly, ever-changing internet is like trying to pin down a raging river. But the British Library is going to try.

For centuries the library has kept a copy of every book, pamphlet, magazine and newspaper published in Britain. Starting this weekend, it will also be bound to record every British website, e-book, online newsletter and blog in a bid to preserve the nation’s “digital memory”.

As if that’s not a big enough task, the library also has to make this digital archive available to future researchers – come time, tide or technological change.

The library says the work is urgent. Ever since people began switching from paper and ink to computers and mobile phones, material that would fascinate future historians has been disappearing into a digital black hole. The library says firsthand accounts of everything from the 2005 London transit bombings to Britain’s 2010 election campaign have already vanished.

“Stuff out there on the web is ephemeral,” said Lucie Burgess, the library’s head of content strategy.

 

“The average life of a web page is only 75 days, because websites change, the contents get taken down.

“If we don’t capture this material, a critical piece of the jigsaw puzzle of our understanding of the 21st century will be lost.”

The library is publicising its new project by showcasing just a sliver of its content – 100 websites, selected to give a snapshot of British online life in 2013 and help people grasp the scope of what the new digital archive will hold.

They range from parenting resource Mumsnet to online bazaar Amazon Marketplace to a blog kept by a 9-year-old girl about her school lunches.

Like reference collections around the world, the British Library has been attempting to archive the web for years in a piecemeal way and has collected about 10,000 sites. Until now, though, it has had to get permission from website owners before taking a snapshot of their pages.

That began to change with a law passed in 2003, but it has taken a decade of legislative and technological preparation for the library to be ready to begin a vast trawl of all sites ending with the suffix .uk.

An automated web harvester will scan and record 4.8 million sites, a total of 1 billion web pages.

Most will be captured once a year, but hundreds of thousands of fast-changing sites such as those of newspapers and magazines will be archived as often as once a day.

The library plans to make the content publicly available by the end of this year.

“We’ll be collecting in a single year what it took 300 years for us to collect in our newspaper archive,” which holds 750 million pages of newsprint, Burgess said.

And it is just the start. Librarians hope to expand the collection to include sites published in other countries with significant British content, as well as Twitter streams and other social media feeds from prominent Britons.

The archive will be preserved at the London institution and at five other British and Irish “legal deposit libraries” – the national libraries of Wales and Scotland, as well as university libraries at Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin.

This is not the biggest attempt to archive the digital universe. The non-profit, San Francisco-based Internet Archive – which developed the web-crawling technology the library is using – has collected 240 billion pages since 1996 on its Wayback Machine at archive.org.

The Library of Congress in Washington, DC, preserves American digital content such as e-books and e-journals and archives online content in collections built around themes and events, but does not routinely save all websites.

“The Library of Congress is committed to saving e-books, but it is not committed to saving what everybody is saying about e-books on the web,” said technology historian Edward Tenner.

Britain is one of the first countries to commit in law to capturing its entire digital domain.

The challenge is not just saving the material, but preserving it. The British Library, which has a collection of 150 million items as much as 3,000 years old, says it wants researchers in future centuries to have access to the content. But anticipating changing technology can be tricky – some years ago it was suggested the library’s vast collection should be saved to CD-ROM.

To ensure the collection doesn’t decay, there will be multiple self-replicating copies on servers around the country, and staff will transfer files into updated formats as technology evolves.

Tenner says keeping up with technology is only one challenge the project faces. Another is the inherently unstable nature of the web. Information constantly mutates, and search engines’ algorithms can change results and prices in an instant – as anyone who has booked airline tickets online knows.

“It is trying to capture an unstable, dynamic process in a fixed way, which is all a librarian can hope to do, but it is missing one of the most positive and negative aspects of the web,” Tenner said.

“Librarians want things as fixed as possible, so people know where something is, people know the content of something. The problem is, the goals of the library profession and the structure of information have been diverging.”

British Library spokesman Ben Sanderson acknowledged that this is new territory for an institution more used to documents written on parchment, paper and the fine calfskin known as vellum.
“Vellum – you don’t need an operating system to read that,” he said.

– AP