ConfCultura: "Revitalizing culture requires skills, listening, labor protection and substantial investment"

ConfCultura is launching an appeal to Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and leading Italian and European institutions to define an action capable of revitalizing the cultural sector. The idea is to establish a double team: a mixed working group with scholars of analysis and scenarios and a technical operational group of companies. The revitalization of culture, however, will not be able to do without shared international measures and a serious policy of listening to the cultural sector, with immediate operational repercussions: these are the demands put forward by ConfCultura in the appeal, in order to urgently address the serious crisis in the sector due to the restrictive measures imposed to contain the Covid-19 contagion.

The association, which aggregates the most important private companies involved in the management and development of the cultural ecosystem, identifies as a priority the protection of employment levels and the need to restart from culture in order to reboot the whole of Italy, through an integrated action at the European level that will generate credible and effective solutions for recovery. For Confcultura, the sector will also have to be relaunched with a series of large and challenging investments and through the involvement of experts.

As an association representing the culture industries, declares Patrizia Asproni, president of ConfCultura, we are ready to take the field alongside the institutions, aware that only through a virtuous and constant collaboration between the public and private sectors is it really possible to achieve the cultural and material progress that represents a driving force for the economy of the Sistema-Paese. Not only that: as foreshadowed in the statements of Minister Dario Franceschini together with the Ministers of Culture of Germany and Spain, we believe it is essential to broaden the theme and the alliance to other European states as well, for a new Ventotene Manifesto that rests its foundations precisely on culture.

The aim, Asproni argues, is to protect and safeguard the country’s positive cultural lecology, “a non-polluting propulsive energy that represents a fertile ground on which Italy’s greatness is founded as well as an important economic engine that drives many other sectors: from tourism to gastronomy, passing through the celebrated Made in Italy. The museum sector alone contributes 27 billion euros a year to Italy’s economic growth, or 1.6 percent of GDP, generating 278 million in revenues” (data are from BCG and MiBACT ’s October 2019 report ).

The sector, precisely because of the ongoing emergency, is experiencing losses of more than 20 million euros a month and will therefore desperately need support to maintain employment (about 117,000 jobs a year) and, at the same time, survive any prolonged suspension of operations.

Pictured: Colosseum and Arch of Constantine. Ph. Credit Arturo Mann

ConfCultura: "Revitalizing culture requires skills, listening, labor protection and substantial investment"

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