Vatican takes stock of Christian treasures online

The Vatican has published a large number of Italian Christian artistic heritage online. The project started 16 years ago and is currently ongoing. The Holy See hopes to bring the legacy and antiques online to help recover the works if they are stolen.

The Vatican website lists nearly 3.5 million artifacts, from paintings, sculptures to jewelry, crosses, churches and other works owned by 63,773 churches in 216 dioceses. of Italy. The data warehouse will be updated regularly. There are thousands of artifacts stored in churches of certain dioceses, like what is happening in Florence and Naples, which are continuing to be counted.

This project is a collaboration between the Vatican and the Italian government, with the participation of dioceses, Italian Ministry of Culture, the Bishops' Conference and the National Office of the Italian Catholic Church. The initial investment is estimated at 51.6 million euros.

The database will be gradually expanded to include the architectural heritage of the Holy See and archived literary materials.

Site users can search by artists, topics, artifacts, dioceses, time and search results will be filtered further if needed. However, the system will still need to be improved.