Brad Pitt's appearance at the Cannes Film Festival sporting what looked like a tattoo of Italy's famed Iceman has led to a surge in web hits for the museum which houses the prehistoric mummy.
Officials at the Archaeological Museum in Bolzano reported more than 2,000 visits to its homepage on Tuesday, when Pitt and partner Angelina Jolie arrived at Cannes, compared to a daily average of 600-700.
This was followed by more than 1,300 visitors to the site - www.archaeologiemuseum.it - on Wednesday.
In all, the museum's hits for the Iceman - also called 'Oetzi' after the Oetz Alpine valley where he was found - more than tripled over the two days.
The tattoo story has spread across celebrity-spotting sites and showbiz blogs this week.
Star-TV.com, an American site, said "observers first thought the outline of an emaciated body may have been that of Jolie".
But bloggers soon "discovered" that the tattoo "is actually a diagram of the Iceman," it reported.
Star-TV speculated that Pitt was inspired by the Iceman because he was roughly the same age as the actor when he died.
Pitt is 43. Oetzi is thought to have been 35 when an arrow wound killed him.
It said the Hollywood star might be thinking of covering his body with tattoos, like Oetzi.
Another celebrity site, Celebitchy.com, said the Oetzi tattoo might have something to do with Jolie's Tomb Raider films, in which she battles villains for ancient artefacts.
All the sites compared the spidery tattoo of a prehistoric-looking man with Oetzi's body shape.
When superimposed, the two appeared to match.
The Iceman is Europe's oldest natural mummy - as opposed to artificial ones created in Egypt.
He was found in a melting glacier on the Italo-Austrian border in 1991, some 5,300 years after he died.
Oetzi, known throughout the world thanks to a string of documentaries, draws thousands of visitors a year to his museum and is a major boost for Bolzano's tourist industry.
