by Tomaso Montanari.
As punctual as a (Swiss!) watch, the Minister for Culture, Dario Franceschini, hardly had enough time to appeal to German managers of industry before the Volkswagen scandal burst into the open. So, now what will happen? Will we be finding ourselves with David’s muffler rigged? Unfortunately, there’s very little to joke about since – despite the light-hearted summer show Chi vuol esser direttore? (“Who wants to be the Director?”) the current situation of Italy’s artistic heritage is rather dramatic and Franceschini’s reform seems to be giving it the final blow.
The Bray Commission for the reform of the Ministry for Culture (of which I was a part) had made it very clear that before embarking upon any sort of governance change it would be necessary to get our “protective and preservation” structure right out of the coma it had got itself into. In other words, both financial as well as personal investments would have been called for. I know very well how much the blockage in the turnover of public sector workers and the sequence of so-called spending reviews make this all the more difficult. However, a minister worthy of such a name (which, in Latin, signifies “he who serves”) should explain to his or her Prime Minister that it is impossible to continue repeating that “our cultural heritage is a strategic resource” and then, at the same time, invest not even a euro in it, letting it go to ruin!
In 2008, the budget for the Ministry for Culture was halved in one sole blow by Silvio Berlusconi, Giulio Tremonti and Sandro Bondi. Nobody since has sought any sort of remedy. So, today we are spending 1.1% of public expenditure on culture (therefore exactly half of the European average), 0.6% of the GNP, a percentage that would indeed indicate a cultural recession.
And that’s not the whole story. The media overexposure of museums is taking place to the detriment of the country: Salvatore Settis has written that it “seems that there is a certain desire for a distinction between a bad company (cultural authorities and the attention paid to and the interest taken in the local areas of the country, against which stood Matteo Renzi when he was the mayor of Florence) – and a good company that represents the museums, seen as organs of cultural “enhancement”. And bad companies are made to be closed”. Indeed, out of a lowly total of 377 art historians (average age: 55 years old!), 240 of them are actually working in museums! The Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica (“The National Art Institute”) has as many art historians (9) as the cultural authorities in Rome, Naples and Florence (with Prato and Pistoia) all put together. In Venice there are fourteen art historians for the museums but only four for the city and Lagoon area as a whole. In Caserta five art historians are closed up in the Reggia Palace (directed by a manager from Bologna completely unaware of what is awaiting him) and only one art historian is defending the local area as a whole. Cultural enhancement is beating protection and preservation two to one and the “minor sites” (90% of our cultural heritage) are purposefully being abandoned. What is the point of taking on twenty museum directors internationally when today only one art historian is working in the region of the Marches and a mere three are having to deal with protecting Milan, Como, Bergamo, Lecco, Lodi, Monza-Brianza, Pavia, Sondrio and Varese and two in Alessandria, Asti, Biella, Cuneo, Novara, Verbano-Cusio-Ossola and Vercelli? Seven art historians are covering the region of Campania with three in Bologna, Modena, Reggio Emilia and Ferrara.
Looking at the situation from this viewpoint, the tradition of “tacit approval” introduced with the Madia Law would appear to be like a bomb primed beneath what has remained of our cultural landscape. How can 634 architects within our cultural authorities keep up with their 150,000 professional colleagues? And how will they be able to reply within 120 days to the requests received from public administration bodies that are desirous of building new motorways and new residential areas? The Under-Secretary for Culture, Ilaria Borletti Buitoni, has stated she will resign if this “primitive rule” of tacit approval becomes law as laid out in the parliamentary decree – a very clearly put strength of purpose that is entirely lacking in the balancing-act words of Minister Franceschini.
A further lethal regulation has now been added to this dire situation, provided for by the very same Madia Law, article 7: the transformation of the Prefectures into “territorial offices of the State, the only contact point between the citizens and the State’s peripheral administration” under the direction of a Prefect who delegates the Government to enable the convergence of all the State’s peripheral offices of civil administration into the State’s Territorial Office”. Translated into practice, this means that the cultural authorities will also have to converge into the Prefectures and that their directors will thus be answerable and subject to the Prefects who are above them in hierarchical terms.
The reason behind the law is officially that it seeks to simplify and speed up decisions (on public works, for example) and so bring back down to the local level of the Prefectures the opportunity to govern (now only the job of the Prime Minister) and pass right over the “no’s” of the cultural authorities. A similar change of direction is enough to destroy a further constitutional countermeasure to executive power and so needs to be interpreted within a framework of hyper-efficiency (for some people, Eugenio Scalfari among them, it is interpreted as a form of incipient authoritarianism) – this is the inspiration behind the Renzi government. Now, the point is: are we willing to sacrifice upon the altar of efficiency such an irreplaceable asset as the preservation of our country? Within our collective imaginations (and also due to them) the directors of our cultural authorities are seen as people who deal with museums and exhibitions or, at the very most, people who cause trouble for those of us who want to put in a window on our roof. However, this sort of judiciary for our landscapes and cultural heritage – which should respond only to Law, Science and Conscience and not to executive power – is the fundamental defence of our heritage since, as expressed in a Native American proverb, “we have not inherited from our forefathers, but we are borrowing from our grandchildren”. What’s at play and risk here is not (merely) the aesthetic appearance of our cities, our coastlines or hillsides but the protection and preservation of our own health in human terms, so closely tied to the safeguarding of our land.
A very recent sentence of the State Council (no. 3652 of 2015) has made it perfectly clear that the task has been given to our cultural authorities to “evaluate, in terms unrelated to other interests, the impact on the landscape”. This is the physiological aspect of a modern democracy but without technical personnel dysfunctions occur and the country dies. Despite mass arms of distraction (such as the super-kitsch Coliseum and the advent of foreign manager-directors), it is more than obvious to most that the death of protection and preservation is our only due.