A total of 135 gargoyles are up for adoption and donors who cough up more than 100,000 euros ($128,000) will have their name engraved under the gargoyle.

Smaller donations of between 10 euros and 100 euros can be made through the campaign’s website at http://adottaunaguglia.duomomilano.it.

The pink marble Gothic cathedral, which was begun in 1387, is a much-loved symbol of the city but has to be cleaned up regularly from pollution.

Gargoyles, which are used as drains for rain water, are typical of Gothic architecture and usually depict grotesque figures.

The cathedral’s management said it wanted “to encourage the Milanese and citizens of the world as a whole to be protagonists in the history of the cathedral … a priceless treasure that belongs to all of humanity.”

Contacted by AFP, cathedral authorities said that since the launch of the campaign last month they had received eight donations of 100,000 euros as well as several smaller donations for a total of 10,000 euros.

Culture has been one of the sectors hardest hit by the financial crisis in Italy. The Italian state allocates just 0.21 percent of its budget to culture, even though it holds half of the world’s cultural heritage.

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By the end of the year, 210,000 paintings will have been dusted off and photographed for inclusion in a ground-breaking online museum, accessible to members of the public at just a click of a button.

“The UK has a very large collection of oil paintings in public ownership and about 80 percent are not on view,” said Andy Ellis, the director of the Public Catalogue Foundation, which has organized the project with the BBC.

In one of the most ambitious art projects in the world, curators have spent 10 years tracking down publicly owned paintings by 45,000 artists from every corner of Britain, from the Shetlands to the Channel Islands.

Some have been in storage and others hung in buildings where there is no access to the public, but they are finally seeing the light of day on a dedicated website, “Your Paintings.”

Museums have helped out where they could but the catalogue required some detective work as about 100 researchers tracked down paintings in universities, police and fire stations, libraries and hospitals.

The hunt took them to a zoo, a lighthouse and to art colleges that held some early works by their famous alumni, including David Hockney.

There were other nice surprises.

A London hospital had a Veronese, a huge triptych by William Hogarth adorned a wall of the town hall in Bristol, surrounded by computers and photocopiers, while a Whistler was found in a Cold War bunker.

Unlike the Google Art Project, an online initiative cataloging works of art from museums across the world, the British website  includes only paintings in oil, acrylic and egg tempera.

This is partly because the curators decided that including watercolors and drawings would have busted its £6-million ($9.5-million, 7.5-million-euro) budget, largely funded by private donations.

But within these techniques, anything and everything is welcome. The work of thousands of obscure painters, such as a fireman who dabbled during the Blitz, is pictured alongside masterpieces by Rembrandt and Raphael.

Ten percent of the paintings remain unattributed, but the curators hope members of the public may be able to help identify their artists, as well as their often mysterious subjects.

“The project is democratic. We include all the works, irrespective of the quality, the condition of the work,” said Ellis.

“The point of this project is to allow everyone to see all the works in the collection and then make the decision themselves about what they like and what they don’t like.”

He added: “We don’t think there is any equivalent anywhere in the world.”

Ellis, a former financier who was drawn into the project through his passion for art, is already looking at how to expand the museum to include sculptures.

“It’s the ultimate realization of Andre Malraux’s dream of a museum without walls,” commented Charles Saumarez Smith, chief executive of the Royal Academy, referring to the post-World War II French writer’s vision of how photography would democratize art.

Visit the Public Catalogue Foundation online at www.bbc.co.uk/yourpaintings.

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TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese sports chiefs on Thursday approved a huge bicycle helmet-style design for their new national stadium, which Tokyo hopes will play center stage if it wins the right to host the 2020 Olympics.

The structure, designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, with a retractable roof and seating for 80,000 people, is expected to cost around $1.62 billion.

The stadium needs to be ready for 2019, when Japan hosts the rugby World Cup, and for the Olympics the following year if Tokyo beats off competition from Madrid and Istanbul.

The new venue will be built on the site of the existing 54,000-seat national stadium in central Tokyo, the centerpiece of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

The government-funded Japan Sport Council, which runs the stadium, selected the design in an international competition, which brought together works by 46 architects.

Hadid, who designed the Aquatics Center for this year’s London Olympics, was awarded 20 million yen ($250,000) as the winner’s prize.

As well as having the same seating capacity as Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium and an all-weather roof, architects were told the new structure would have to be environmentally efficient and match the surrounding landscape.

“It has dynamism, which is most essential to sport and its streamlined shape fits its internal space. It is also new in terms of structural technology,” said Japanese architect Tadao Ando, who chaired the competition jury.

Japanese Olympic Committee president Tsunekazu Takeda, who is also president of the Tokyo bid committee, welcomed the decision, saying the new structure will be “the best of the best” and “the first all-weather Olympic Stadium.”

The International Olympic Committee will vote to choose the 2020 Olympic venue in Buenos Aires in September next year. Tokyo and Istanbul are widely seen as front-runners.

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