And six years ago, Mr. Cappellini's office began charging tour buses a drop-off fee that is significantly reduced if tourists visit one of the civic museums (which have exceptional Renaissance masterpieces) or eat or sleep inside the city walls.
It's been hailed around Europe as "unique", "extraordinary", "exceptional", "unparalleled", "a masterpiece", "a new way for literature to exist" and compared to Céline, Mann and (most often) Proust.
The result is a mainstream masterpiece from an exceptional stylist poised to replace Bill Evans and Tommy Flanagan in the public imagination.
Conductor Stephen Barlow and director Stephen Medcalf declare themselves partisans of Leonore, which they believe to be more satisfying and illuminating than Fidelio, though the majority of Beethoven commentators disagree, arguing that the tighter structure of the later revision and the composer's innumerable rewrites, small and large, turned something exceptional but awkward into a masterpiece.
In my Art Talk last week, I highly praised two exceptional museum exhibitions full of masterpieces of religious art.
"Told over six episodes, Andrew Davies will bring his exceptional powers of adaptation to this literary masterpiece".
Masterpieces in every field are achieving exceptional prices, and rightly so.
"It has the best prints in the best condition and a whole string of major masterpieces, as well as pictures of exceptional quality by almost unknown artists.
Carl Nielsen's Flute Concerto is another modestly scored Scandinavian masterpiece for which the Northern Sinfonia's exceptional principal flautist Juliette Bausor takes the soloist's role.
