The Chamber of Deputies and Google Romania launched on Thursday an online platform for the virtual tour of Parliament halls and of the Parliament Museum. Starting this week, the building of Parliament Palace can be “visited” by street view images by anyone in the world connected to the Internet.
“It is a virtual tour of some halls, built beautifully by the effort of Romanian craftsmen, from 1980 to 2013, when this investment was finalized, and we have tried to present works of art and heritage, which the Parliament Palace has, but also its halls. It is an effort that we have made with Google Institute, at the initiative of a Romanian living abroad, who works for Google Ireland, and who came up with this idea, to do a virtual tour. The connection with Google Romania came, and after almost two years we have managed to do this virtual tour,” said the Chamber of Deputies’ Speaker Valeriu Zgonea.
According to him, the beautiful things that Romania has built in recent years must be shown to the entire world.
“There are very many Romanians who maybe are financially strapped and do not have time to go to the Parliament Palace. This is people’s house and the people have the right to see it, maybe it is more accessible for them on the internet. (…) There are nearly 150 paintings from the national heritage, out of the several hundreds that the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate have,” Zgonea said.
He mentioned that the project is a free partnership is aimed at increasing the number of visitors to the Parliament Palace.
In turn, Google Romania CEO Dan Bulucea said that through this launch, new collections of art, civilization and traditions from Romania are available to the world on Google Cultural Institute.
“We are glad that an important landmark of Bucharest’s but also Romania’s, the Parliament Palace, can be visited on Google Cultural Institute. We intend to further attract new partners to promote the Romanian cultural heritage in the world with the Google Cultural Institute’s support,” said Bulucea. The virtual tour includes the Nicolae Iorga, Union, Take Ionescu and Al. I. Cuza halls, and digitized paintings by Nicolae Grigorescu Octav Bancila and Corneliu Baba. More…