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Day-trippers will have to pay €5 to visit Italian city under scheme designed to protect it from excess tourismAuthorities in Venice have been accused of transforming the famous lagoon city into a “theme park” as a long-mooted entrance fee for day trippers comes into force.Venice is the first major city in the world to enact such a scheme. The €5 (£4.30) charge, which comes...

A collection of more than 7,000 letters will form a publicly accessible digital archive that offers a window to the past In the week that Ireland turns ­everything green and celebrates its diaspora, a new online archive has given voice to the human cost paid by generations of emigrants.More than 7,000 letters from emigrants to North America spanning four centuries have been collected and...

Instrument was adapted, translated and corrected by Muslim and Jewish users in Spain, north Africa and ItalyAlmost exactly a year ago, Federica Gigante was preparing a lecture and searching the internet for a portrait of the 17th-century Italian nobleman and collector Ludovico Moscardo when an altogether different image caught her eye.The historian’s gaze soon snagged on a photo of a metal disc with a...

Chilean social media users target institution, forcing it at one point to close comments on postsThe British Museum is tackling an influx of social media trolls from Chile, who have flooded the museum’s Instagram posts calling for the return of a moai statue, one of the stone monuments from Easter Island.The museum has two moai, which were taken from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) by...

Antiquities authority drops proposal for Menkaure pyramid after review prompted by international outcryEgypt has scuttled a controversial plan to reinstall ancient granite cladding on the pyramid of Menkaure, the smallest of the three great pyramids of Giza, a committee formed by the country’s tourism minister said in a statement.Mostafa Waziri, the secretary general of the supreme council of antiquities, announced the plan last month,...