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Vatican's Museums to Limit Number of Visitors as of May

The deserted entrance of the closed Vatican Museums during a lockdown aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19, March 24, 2020, Vatican City (AFP Photo)
The deserted entrance of the closed Vatican Museums during a lockdown aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19, March 24, 2020, Vatican City (AFP Photo)
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Vatican's Museums to Limit Number of Visitors as of May

The deserted entrance of the closed Vatican Museums during a lockdown aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19, March 24, 2020, Vatican City (AFP Photo)
The deserted entrance of the closed Vatican Museums during a lockdown aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19, March 24, 2020, Vatican City (AFP Photo)

The Vatican Museums and Gardens will be reopening to visitors on May 3 following a temporary opening, museum organizers have announced. While visitors will have a chance to see the fine craftsmanship on the ceiling of the renowned Sistine Chapel, Italy's tourism remains hobbled by the coronavirus pandemic.

Currently, there are hardly any tourists in Rome because of the travel restrictions in Italy.

In pre-pandemic times, a visit to the Vatican Museums often meant queues, overcrowding and guards telling you to move along.

Announcing the plans on March 8, the museums' organizers in the Vatican City said that for public health reasons, visits will still need to be booked in advance on the museums' website.

In addition, only a limited number of guests will be admitted. The opening date is also provisional and will ultimately depend on COVID-19 infection rates at the time.

Recently, the infection curve in Italy had dropped slightly, but the figures are still generally higher than in other parts of Europe.

The museums in the Vatican had been closed again after a temporary opening after the third wave in March. Their visitor numbers have risen steadily in recent years, to 6.7 million in 2019. Ticket sales are an important source of revenue for the Vatican City State.

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The Surprising Reason Why There Are No Human Remains in the Titanic

The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
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The Surprising Reason Why There Are No Human Remains in the Titanic

The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The Titanic, a symbol of hubris and human tragedy, has been a source of fascination for more than 112 years.

But the fact is, the sunken ocean liner was more than just movie fodder or a deep-sea explorer’s holy grail, it was a very real ship on which more than 1,500 people died.

And yet, whilst experts, using the most sophisticated submersible and underwater filming equipment, have found some extraordinary relics from the wreckage, they have never found any skeletons or bones.

“I’ve seen zero human remains,” James Cameron, director of the iconic 1997 film, told the New York Times back in 2012.

“We’ve seen clothing. We’ve seen pairs of shoes, which would strongly suggest there was a body there at one point. But we’ve never seen any human remains.”

Given that Cameron has visited and explored the wreck some 33 times (and claims to have spent more time on the ship than the ship’s captain), if he hasn’t seen any human remains we can assume that there really aren’t any there. So why is this?

It’s a question that has recently been perplexing Reddit users but, luckily, it has some relatively simple answers.

Whilst there was a notoriously insufficient number of lifeboats on the ship, many passengers and crew members still managed to put on life jackets. This means that they remained buoyant even after they succumbed to the freezing cold waters of the Atlantic.

And so, when a storm followed the sinking of the “unsinkable” ship, they were likely swept away from the site of the wreckage and carried further away over subsequent weeks and years by ocean currents.

“The issue you have to deal with is, at depths below about 3,000 feet (around 914 meters), you pass below what's called the calcium carbonate compensation depth,” deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard explained to NPR back in 2009.

“And the water in the deep sea is under saturated in calcium carbonate, which is mostly, you know, what bones are made of. For example, on the Titanic and on the Bismarck, those ships are below the calcium carbonate compensation depth, so once the critters eat their flesh and expose the bones, the bones dissolve,” he said.

Nevertheless, some people believe that there may still be some preserved bodies in sealed off parts of the ship, such as the engine room.

This is because fresh oxygen-rich water that scavengers rely on may not have been able to enter these areas.

Nevertheless, more than a century since the tragedy, it seems likely that such searches for remains would be fruitless.