Not that I’m going or anything, but I just learned about a cool exhibit running at the Franklin Institute there: Leonardo da Vinci’s Workshop
“The genius of Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest mind of the Renaissance, springs to life in this much heralded exhibit from Italy,” the institute said on its website.
It added that for the first time new discoveries about “The Last Supper,” one of his most famous paintings, will be unveiled.
A digital restoration of the work highlights elements that had been obscured by five centuries of deterioration, including plates of fish and slices of orange on the table where Jesus and his disciples are sitting. It also reveals a bell tower rising in the distance behind the figure of Jesus.
The lack of halos on the figures of Jesus and the disciples suggests that da Vinci was not a religious man and may even have had an antagonistic relationship with the monks who commissioned the painting, according to Mario Taddei, a co-curator of the exhibition.
“These are common people,” Taddei said, referring to the figures in the painting.
On the topic of digital, I also ran across a cool thing Google’s been doing with art work at several museums:
the search giant has hooked up with 17 art museums around the world to offer tours of their internal galleries, using its familiar Street View tricycles, while also doing high-res images of 1,061 artworks that may be viewed on the newly launched Art Project web portal. Also there, you will find 17 special gigapixel images — 7,000-megapixel versions of each participating venue’s proudest possession. The resulting level of detail is nothing short of astounding
So for those who’ll never get to those galleries (like moi), we can still get a fantastic look at the stuff at home via Google Art Project.
One Minion's Opinion 
I’ve been to a da v workshop in San Francisco. It was good, but a bit too much geared for the kiddies. If I had some kids, it would have been great, but as an adult, it lost something. Anyway, he was one smart dude.
There are lots of reasons to go to Philadelphia other then just this exhibit. There is the rest of the Franklin exhibit, Academy of Natural Sciences, the Mütter Museum, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
It has major art museums. It has the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Rodin Museum. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, is one of the largest art museums in the US.
Philadelphia was a very large and very rich city and it has been deeply involved in the history of the united states. It is where the US constitution was signed and the government established before being moved to Washington DC.
I was being flippant on purpose. heh. I know there’s a lot to do in a city with that much political history but that’s a pretty fine list of other tourist ideas, too. Thanks for posting them.