Opinions

Has the Carrara Academy in Bergamo become unmanageable?

Even the most attentive observers of the museum and art world are struggling to follow the events surrounding Bergamo's Accademia Carrara, an institution founded in 1781 at the behest of Giacomo Carrara, which became a civic museum in 1958 and a publ...
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How we tell the story of rock art: the case of Camonica Valley museums

The Regional Directorate of National Museums of Lombardy manages several sites that are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site: among the thirteen sites that the directorate manages, in addition to Valle Camonica, was the Last Supper (later passed un...
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Did the Jubilee need a mascot? And was it needed in manga style?

But of all the artists in its millennial history, did the Catholic Church really need a Japanese cartoon-style design to make the Jubilee 'mascot'? The unsettling choice (there are even those who wonder if there was a need to have a 'mascot,' like fo...
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What was the really dark part of Giuli's speech.

No: the least clear part of the speech that Minister Alexander Giuli gave in the House last Oct. 8 to outline his policies was not the "somewhat more theoretical" introduction, it wasn't that preamble about "defensive apocalypticism" and the "global ...
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Unesco sites and tourism: protection essential, but the Unesco label is often useful for promotion

There are Unesco sites that, we could say, do not need promotion: I am thinking for example of Venice or Petra. On the contrary: the problem is really to protect the site. So there are sites like Petra that benefit from this recognition, or should at...
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Artissima? Boring as hell. In Turin this year it was better to enjoy the sunshine

Unseasonable warmth, clear skies, twenty-one degrees Celsius in an unrecognizable late-October Turin, a full week of high pressure from Monday to Sunday and perhaps beyond that guarantees constant, determined, present, casual sunshine to make the cit...
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Tourism in Unesco sites: balance is needed between tourism planning and site management

I am going to enumerate the Unesco sites in the Veneto: Venice and its Lagoon, Vicenza and the Palladian villas, Verona, Padua (my city, which has two Unesco sites: the Botanical Garden and, recently, the fresco cycles of the 14th century, and theref...
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Bulgari Prize 2024 finalists: art that doesn't really impact

The three finalist works of the Bulgari Prize were presented in Rome at the Maxxi Museum. As has been the case periodically for the past few years, a few curators indicate a few artists and then an international jury defines the short list of finalis...
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The flood of skills: a story that starts with conservation

In the face of the environmental tragedies that increasingly strike Italy - these days the fourth flood in two years in part of Emilia, including Bologna - with deaths, missing people, thousands homeless, hundreds of millions in damages and so on, I ...
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Beyond the "beautiful sites": how to make tourism in UNESCO sites by telling their value

The question I would start with is: what is the role of UNESCO in relation to tourism? In fact, if you read the 1972 convention very carefully, you will never find the word "tourism," you will never find the phrase "territorial promotion," you will n...
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Having a UNESCO site is crucial for tourism, but we need to work with research and protection

As the tourism promotion body of Romagna, we have a fundamental task, a great honor: that of promoting an enlarged territory, consisting of four provinces (Ferrara, Forlì-Cesena, Ravenna and Rimini), and if anyone knows what kind of triangle t...
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Rome, are Briatore's flowers less decorous than the Trevi Fountain walkway?

A couple of weeks ago, the Municipality of Rome sanctioned Flavio Briatore's Crazy Pizza restaurant with a 212-euro fine for violation of the regulations on outdoor arrangements: the flowers decorating the restaurant's facade were not in line with th...
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Why nowadays ArtVerona is much better than Frieze in London

Let me explain why at this historical stage a contemporary art fair like ArtVerona is much better than Frieze in London. Despite the fact that this year the London fair seems to be seemingly relaunched. We are coming from a historical period, the la...
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Is it right for a seminal masterpiece by Pietro Lorenzetti to fly from Arezzo to New York?

Giorgio Vasari also speaks of the Tarlati Polyptych, a masterpiece by Pietro Lorenzetti that since 1320 has never moved from the site for which it was painted, the church of Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo, in his Lives: in Vasari's compendium is "...
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Museums cannot help but transform to respond to changes in contemporary society

Public debate about the scope of museum institutions, the social functions of the museum, and the actions to be taken to attract more and more visitors usually intensifies after watershed events that have collective implications, such as world confli...
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Yes, in Italy we know how to make great exhibitions and not only great exhibitions

Immediately a list of great exhibitions to answer those who say that there are no quality exhibitions in Italy: Moroni in Milan, Pierre Huyghe in Venice, the Pre-Raphaelites in Forlì, Toulouse-Lautrec in Rovigo, Masolino in Empoli, Pier France...
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