Word: vinci
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wonder Ellen McBreen, who runs private tours of Paris art museums, kept hearing the same question on her Louvre walkabouts: "Is this where the curator was murdered?" The curator in question, Jacques Saunière, is a fictional character in Dan Brown's ubiquitous best seller The Da Vinci Code, but her clients' interest was real and surprisingly keen. Some of the novel's "hard-core followers," McBreen remembers, came to the Louvre equipped with highlighted passages and well-researched questions. McBreen sensed a business opportunity for her tour company, Paris Muse. In February, she started to offer Cracking...
...Time. "So I made an initiative" to convert those chambers into mosques. In 1996, Awwad began renovating an underground hall called Solomon's Stables. The 4,000-sq-m hall was used by the Crusaders to stable their horses (it features in Dan Brown's best seller The Da Vinci Code as the place where the Knights Templars hatched their plots). When Awwad was done in early 2000, it was dubbed the Marwani Mosque. Awwad hauled thousands of tons of rubble from a massive new entrance to the mosque. He claims he merely pulled out fill from an existing Crusader...
...with some other high-profile art-theft cases, the outcome is still in doubt. Last year two men posing as tourists stole Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna with the Yarnwinder from Drumlanrig Castle near Dumfries, Scotland. That case is still unsolved. So is the most spectacular art robbery in the U.S., the 1990 break-in at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Thieves disguised as policemen made off with 13 pictures, including a Manet, three Rembrandts and Vermeer's magnificent small canvas The Concert...
Publishers have rushed to print scholarly tomes analyzing Da Vinci minutiae. One of them, Secrets of the Code (CDS Books), is already a Times best seller...
Christian publishers have churned out more than half a dozen books refuting the Code. One of them, Breaking the Da Vinci Code (Thomas Nelson), is also a best seller...