"The new autonomy of regional museums will change everything." Filippo Demma (director of Basilicata Museums) speaks.

“It will change the world. The enormous transformations of recent years that have taken place in autonomous museums, which are there for all to see, will surely be extended to the new autonomous regional directorates, with all the advantages associated with them.” Philip Demma, with responsibility for the Regional Directorate of National Museums (DrMn) of Basilicata, which, with the Dpcm of March 15, 2024, was united with the autonomous institution of the National Archaeological Museum of Matera, where the outgoing director, Annamaria Mauro, was not renewed for the next four years. Director of the Archaeological Park of Sybaris since November 2020 (he was recently confirmed for a second term), Demma also boasts an almost four-year-long experience at the Calabria Directorate, an additional post at the head of the cinderella among directorates that has been waiting for years for the selection of a new incumbent and that since last November 15 has known yet another delegation, assigned to Fabrizio Sudano, director of the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria, host of the first installment of our investigation on new regional directorates. With Demma, therefore, we were able to get a more circumstantial idea of what may have been the reasons that presided over the recent ministerial choices with which the process of autonomist reform initiated in 2014 was brought to fruition (but the ultimate goal was the institutionalization of museums and parks, as Franceschini’s former chief of staff, Lorenzo Casini, told us). With one inescapable precondition: adequate financial and personnel resources are needed. The Basilicata Directorate includes sites that are less well-known to the general public, but no less interesting and evocative than the more emblazoned destinations. Autonomy, the archaeologist tells us, will be a gamble precisely for the “geographically more peripheral” sites. There are sixteen in all, including the National Archaeological Museum of Basilicata “Dinu Adamesteanu” in Potenza, the National Museum of Medieval and Modern Art of Basilicata (in Palazzo Lanfranchi, Matera), the National Archaeological Museum in Muro Lucano (Potenza), the National Museum of the Siritide in Policoro (Matera), with figurative ceramics (7th-6th centuries B.C.C) among the oldest made in Magna Graecia; the exhibition venue in the Ducal Palace in Tricarico (Matera); the Grumentum Archaeological Park in Grumento Nova (Potenza), within the Lucanian Apennines National Park; or, again, the Temple of the Palatine Tables, or Temple of Hera (6th century B.C.), in Bernalda (Matera).

MS. Among the novelties introduced in 2014 by the Franceschini reform, the “regional museum poles” immediately proved to be the weak points of the ministerial reorganization. In your opinion, what were the critical aspects of those structures?

FD. I think that the criticalities were probably caused by the poor central coordination of the then Directorate General for Museums, which did not adequately govern the process of transferring to the new institutes the competencies and places of culture and the resources to manage them. There was also a great deal of internal resistance from those who did not share that “vision.” At the time of the transfer, in particular, there were strong critical issues related to the conditions of the heritage, especially the unexposed heritage, the repositories, and all the administrative, technical, and bureaucratic archives. There was the real problem of the handover to the new institutions of assets that could not be delivered, because they had no inventories and had poor documentation. This situation further slowed down the process. When you take over a place of culture, a work of art or an archaeological find, you take on responsibilities. Let me explain, if all the documentation inherent in these assets is not perfectly formed and transmissible, and there are cases where these situations have occurred, both those who hand over and those who have to take over the control and management of these assets face difficulties in terms of civil, criminal and administrative liability. Responsibilities that are always in the hands of the managers, and that is why the processes have slowed down.

Has anything then changed in 2019 with the “regional museum directorates,” beyond the new wording?

Very little has changed. Obviously, there was four years of previous experience, so we were at a more advanced point and an awareness of the needs connected with this new, different model of managing museums and collections was also formed in the managers. At that time, new autonomous institutes were created by separating them from the regional directorates, including the one in Sibari, so I speak of them with good reason, which if they relieved the tasks of the latter aggravated them on the other hand, because often all the transitions of assets and competencies that, as we said, had been created four years earlier with the creation of the museum clusters were punctually repeated when the new institutes were created.

What is the reason why diversification has now been introduced between directorates coinciding with a Region and others aggregated to autonomous institutes? And in what does the difference consist?

Frankly I have no idea, you should ask the director general and the minister. I can speculate that it was evaluated that in smaller regions with fewer institutes, as Liguria and Marche were originally, it would be functional to bring the offices together both in terms of economy and effectiveness of administrative action and saving resources, but also in view of thegradual introduction of the autonomy model for museum directorates as well, in the absence of which the rope of difficulties has been increasingly stretched, the reason why the most recent regulations have provided for managerial, financial and scientific autonomy for these institutes as well. So the temporary move to amalgamate, as was done, some regional directorates to an already formed autonomous institute can be read as the experimentation of what would then happen shortly thereafter. But, again, this is just my speculation.

The aggregations, then, occur exclusively with museums or parks of non-general management level. Is there a reason why the Regional Directorates of National Museums have not been combined with the “stronger” first-tier autonomous institutes?

The first-tier institutes have objectives and resources commensurate with the grandeur and importance of the assets under management and the tasks assigned to them. I believe, therefore, that it would not have been functional to “burden” a first-tier institute with additional responsibility to peripheral museums. The former were conceived and structured to ensure maximum efficiency in the enhancement of certain monumental, historical-artistic and archaeological contexts with particularly complex management characteristics. I imagine, therefore, that amalgamating a regional directorate, which, on the other hand, has other territorial management problems than an autonomous first institute, would have somehow compromised or at least made it difficult to achieve the objectives for which the latter was created. But that, too, is an assessment made by the director general and the minister, and an answer can only be given by them.

Will the mergers also be useful in generating economies of scale by sharing services, instrumentation, professional expertise?

Yes. But this is not something that will be facilitated by the mergers per se, but rather, I think, by the management autonomy extended to the regional museums directorates as well.

In this network perspective (if effective) are there moments of exchange, such as technical tables convened with some regularity, among you directors to compare different experiences? Replicate successful ones, solve common problems or share models and planning?

Absolutely. Within the national museum system, the General Directorate of Museums organizes and has organized more institutional and informal meetings between directors to compare different experiences. Director Massimo Osanna is very attentive and present in all the logics that serve to share management and managerial knowledge. Personally, I also appreciate his ability to team up and create close-knit groups of managers who share not only issues and problems, but also ways of working.

What do you think will change with the new autonomy compared to the past? Specifically, from a financial point of view.

It changes the world. The enormous transformations of the last few years that have taken place in the autonomous museums, which are there for all to see, will certainly be extended to the new autonomous regional directorates, with all the advantages associated with being able to plan and act on programming autonomously, especially in terms of resources that are allocated the year before for the year after and allow you to plan your action in the field of enhancement and in that field of the part of protection that is assigned to you. They cannot fail to produce the same benefits that have been recorded at the Colosseum, at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, at Pompeii. And, let me say, also to the archaeological parks of Crotone and Sybaris, which with autonomy have quintupled access and more than quadrupled revenues, providing, above all, a quality service, which was what attracted new audiences. And if this has happened for a difficult and all in all geographically peripheral reality such as these parks, all the more reason this scenario may come true for the large and important museums framed in the current DrMn, which will certainly experience a season of greater prominence from the point of view of content elaboration, quality of the service and also, we all hope, of the response of the public, by which we do not mean only the public of tourists, but also of the local, city, regional and national communities to which these museums in the first instance address themselves, and must address themselves, always with a view to the need that the Faro Convention had already signaled to us to build “community structures.” The necessary condition is, of course, that these institutes are provided with the necessary resources, in terms of personnel, and here the effort has been considerable with continuous competitions, recruitment, exhaustion of rankings, but also in terms of financial allocations. And this depends on the policies that the whole government decides to adopt: autonomous institutes without adequate financial allocation do not produce effects, indeed they can produce devastating effects. Let me explain, it is one thing to be able to take on urgent, operating expenditures on an ex-post basis, as was the case when the regional directorates were not autonomous, that is, to make the expenditures and then proceed with payments as needed. It is another thing to have a prior allocation with which all needs must be covered. If this endowment is not sufficient it is clear how we will face a problem. We will go backward instead of forward. This is the critical issue related to economic-financial autonomy, which works well, I repeat, as long as the resources are adequate, otherwise it is bankrupt. But we are very confident that the Ministry will find and allocate all the resources necessary for the machine to work well.

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