The Uffizi Gallery is to tighten security after a journalist managed to bring a knife into the famous Florentine museum.
The gallery, which has the world's largest collection of Florentine Renaissance art, is already working with police including Italy's famed art cops to "make corrections and introduce improvements," Uffizi Superintendent Cristina Acidini said after the journalist's feat.
The Uffizi has "some critical areas like all large museums," she acknowledged after La Repubblica reported that one of its Florence staffers managed to roam the huge gallery for hours with a knife in his pocket.
Acidini said the museum, which attracts over a million visitors a year, put its guards and gallery attendants through a security training course a month ago.
Italian museums raised security at the end of the 1990s after a series of pictures in Rome were found with pin-pricks in them - most likely caused by student pens.
The Uffizi has never suffered major acts of vandalism or theft - although it was rocked by a Mafia car bomb in 1993.
In 1998 a part of a Roman general's sarcophagus was stolen.
