B.B. King Museum opens in Mississippi

B.B. King Museum opens in Mississippi

INDIANOLA, Miss. — A new museum has opened to honor music legend B.B. King.

The B.B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center, which opened Saturday with King in attendance, is located in Indianola.

Organizers say the $14 million museum is meant to honor King, telling his story of growing up in nearby Delta cotton fields and achieving fame and fortune as a popular blues musician.

The project features a historic brick cotton gin building in which King once worked, and a new education outreach wing.

For more information, visit www.bbkingmuseum.org.

Birmingham museum preps for da Vinci tour

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The Birmingham Museum of Art is preparing for an exhibit of Leonardo da Vinci drawings that will be shown later this month for the first time in the United States.

The exhibition, “Leonardo da Vinci: Drawings from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin,” opens Sept. 28 and runs through Nov. 9 in Birmingham.

The works cover one of da Vinci’s most celebrated notebooks, the “Codex on the Flight of Birds,” and 11 important drawings.

The drawings have never traveled as a group before or been made available outside Italy in its entirety.

For more information, visit www.artsbma.org.

Sept. 11 Pentagon memorial opening

ARLINGTON, Va. — A new permanent memorial park has been built to honor victims of the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon.

The memorial, dedicated on this year’s anniversary of the attacks, is located on the grounds of the Pentagon in Arlington.

Terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, killing 59 people on the plane and 125 people working inside the building, which houses the U.S. Department of Defense.

The park consists of 184 memorial units in a field, one inscribed to each victim. The units, made from steel and gravel, are shaped like cantilevered benches. They are positioned so that if you read the name of a flight passenger, you face the sky; if you read the name of a victim from the Pentagon, you face the building.

The site will be open to visitors 24 hours a day. There is no admission fee. The memorial is easily accessible by bus, and from the blue and yellow lines of Washington’s Metro, which serve the Pentagon stop in Arlington.

For more information, visit memorial.pentagon.mil.

Free walking and bike tours in Washington

WASHINGTON — More than 80 free walking and biking tours will be offered Saturday and next Sunday in Washington for “WalkingTown,” an event designed to highlight the capitol as a walkable city.

The event is held twice a year, sponsored by Cultural Tourism DC, a nonprofit coalition of Washington heritage and arts organizations.

Tours offered include bike tours of area Civil War forts; a visit to Florida Market/Capital City Market; a “Spies of Georgetown” walking tour; an insider’s look at artwork in Metro stations; and a kids’ architectural tour of Dupont Circle.

A complete schedule is available at www.WalkingTownDC.org.

Associated Press