Opinions

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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A Picasso rediscovered in Pompeii? What are the still unsolved doubts

On Sept. 30, as usually happens when faced with proposed attributions with a rocambolic history behind them, a good part of the Italian media reported the news of a rediscovered Picasso, recognized as such after decades in which it had remained on di...
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The art market is in crisis because the absence of criticism and confrontation has killed the contemporary

Is the art market in crisis? And is that really a bad thing? Also, which art? That which is contemporary but is actually modern (i.e., from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s)? Or that which is truly "contemporary" and made in the last fifteen ...
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Trevi Fountain for a fee? Crazy idea, impractical, and would cause negative phenomena

I am deeply opposed to the proposal, but I say right away that the problem is not in the cost, whether it is 2 euros or 5 or 10. It is not about defending tourists from a payment. The reasons are quite different. Contrary to what Councillor Onorato i...
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Putting a fee on the Trevi Fountain: a dystopian, grotesque and wrong idea, here's why

According to Rome's tourism councilor, Alessandro Onorato, visiting the Trevi Fountain should be an "experience," whatever that means: his word, he said so in a video he posted on his Instagram profile. Now, it is not important to investigate what th...
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