A petition to Franceschini to demand the purchase of the Aurora Casino: thousands of signatures

Circulating on Change.org is a petition to Cultural Heritage Minister Dario Franceschini urging the state to purchase the Casino dell’Aurora, the historic annex of Villa Ludovisi where the only known mural painting by Caravaggio, a masterpiece by Guercino (theAurora that gives the building its name), frescoes by Domenichino and other important works of art are located. The Casino will go up for auction on January 18, and since it is a listed property, the state will be able to exercise its right of first refusal.

However, the auction will start from a monstrous valuation: in fact, the estimate is 471 million euros (although there are experts who have made criticisms of the method used to value the building), and the minimum bid is 353. An unaffordable price, therefore, and according to many also unrealistic, so much so that there is speculation that the first auction may be deserted.

“No one would want to write such a petition,” the text reads: “the Casino dell’Aurora, what remains of Villa Ludovisi, extolled by Gogol, James and D’Annunzio as a wonder of united Italy, then torn down for wild subdivision, will be sold at auction to private individuals when the state should have exercised the right of first refusal on the priceless fresco by Caravaggio valued at 350 million euros, on the beautiful paintings by Guercino, on a garden designed by Lenottre (the one in Versailles, to be clear...). We use European funds to safeguard something that is ours. Only the economy is recognized as the pick of society, but, deprived of creativity, life has become dismal; culture is no longer counted among the important things; it seems that a past, though splendid, is no longer useful; profit has locked men into a horizonless present. Sign such a petition to prevent another piece of Italy, the beautiful one, from being sold off: let’s use PNRR funds to take over Villa Aurora!”

The proposal to use the PNRR funds to exercise the right of first refusal is unrealistic: the so-called “Recovery Plan” has already been approved, but even if it had still been under discussion it would hardly have been allocated to the Aurora Casino alone an amount equal to 5 percent of all that the plan reserves for culture (6.675 billion), admitting an adjudication at the minimum threshold. The minimum adjudication figure also equals about one-fifth of the Ministry of Culture’s budget. However, given that the petition has been signed by more than thirty thousand people, the pressure on the government is not negligible, so much so that, Repubblica reveals today, Dario Franceschini is reported to have written to Mario Draghi to understand how the government intends to move on the issue. In any case, the newspaper explains, “until someone is awarded the sixteenth-century treasure chest (and it is not certain that this will happen on January 18, the auction could go empty), neither the Ministry of Culture nor the government will make their moves known: the effect would be to drug the price of the Casino.”

In the photo, the mural of Caravaggio

A petition to Franceschini to demand the purchase of the Aurora Casino: thousands of signatures

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